The story is that you're an elderly Victorian clergyman on your way back to your home parish in England, about to board a boat in a French coastal village, when you spy a German girl, traveling with her father, and are smitten. A poor artist named John Austin is also staying in town, and his looks and artistic ability may figure into the story--but they may not. Muse has several different endings, all of them quite plausible, though some are harder to reach than others. In particular, one suboptimal ending--one that is categorically different from the others--is almost impossible to attain without knowledge obtained by previous playings, in that you must do certain actions in a rather nonintuitive order. That aside, though, the alternate endings fit the feel of the story well: the game portrays your situation as torn between diverging paths; the decisions you make, it is clear, have a more than incidental effect on the course of your life. It makes sense to structure the game in such a way that you try to figure out how to change your life for the better, not simply how to make it progress. Furthering that aim is the first-person-singular-past narrative, which reinforces that the story is happening to a real character, not the player in period costume, and also conveys the feeling that the story is a reminiscence, not a happening-right- now tale of adventure that the character has to make his way through. Setting the story in the past makes it more clearly a "musing."
Unfortunately, though story-centered, Muse is not entirely puzzle-free, and some of the puzzles break the feel of the story. One in particular requires calculated manipulation of a character to achieve certain ends, different in process but not in nature from manipulating objects to pass obstacles, as might happen in your conventional puzzle-oriented game. It makes your character less human and sympathetic to have to figure out which of another character's buttons to push. This is not an atypical IF experience, particularly in NPC interaction, when many games require the character to fire off conversation topics until the right one unlocks the door, so to speak, of the NPC--but Muse stands or falls on its NPCs, and it's disappointing when they become doors to unlock. (Moreover, in some situations, the game closed off entirely without warning--the conversation could progress no further.) Exacerbating that feeling is the small array of topics available--again, typical, but still frustrating, particularly when it produces results like these:
>ask konstanza about mother's death Chatting with Konstanza, even on frivolous subjects, was a pleasant experience, and it was a while before I realised how far we had digressed.Muse does endeavor to show the limitations on conversation imposed by Victorian customs, and the feeling of constraint produced thereby is well done: I was forced to get at what I wanted indirectly, much as someone of the period would have had to. But so arbitrary seemed the point that determined whether certain information was available that it broke mimesis; it made the requirement seem like a programming flag, not a real turning point in the conversation.
It's a shame because, as observed, Muse has a lot of terrific ideas going for it. The interactions among different NPCs are complicated and well-rendered; they don't feel nearly as artificial as those between the player character and the NPCs because they're not so obviously controlled. Muse makes a valiant attempt at bringing out the psychologies of its characters and making them central to the game. The reasons for many NPC actions are quite subtle--they may be doors to unlock in some instances, but they certainly are interesting doors. (Though only three of the seven NPCs offer much in the way of psychology, unfortunately--the others are fairly flat.) The game also relies on your role as a clergyman--your actions make sense from that perspective, you are constrained by that role, and other characters see you through your collar--which helps amplify the story element of Muse. And the story itself is rather moving at many points, particularly in the various endings, and the various box quotes that the author uses--Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Francis of Assisi--are particularly effective.
The author has seamlessly rewritten the Inform parser for the first person, past tense, and I could find no technical problems with Muse. In virtually all respects, it's a thorough, well-thought-out, effective story. The inherent limitations of IF puzzles put a crimp in the NPC interaction and make you less a character than a player pushing through to the end of the story, which is unfortunate because you really do inhabit much of the story as a character. I enjoyed Muse, but considered it an idea with unrealized potential, and I gave it an 8.