Rarely does a game sweep me off my feet, carry me giggling and squealing over verdant meadows, only to dump me off a cliff into a pool of sharks. That's how I felt after attempting to play Rob Wheeler's <em>The 12:45 to Asgard,</em> a game that offers a great deal of promise in its first part, only to falter and eventually collapse in its second part. Indeed, the two parts of the game are so far off in terms of polish and implementation that I wonder if two different authors had their hands in this.

Enter the life of a disgruntled maintenance man who has been called into work during the middle of a torrential thunderstorm. Within a few turns after entering your workplace--a TV studio shut down for the evening--it's clear that your goal is to fix the leak in the roof. A meter in the status bar, which starts at "foul", measures your mood as you progress through your main task and a few other chores you might discover along the way.

The depiction of the Studio A's innards, of it's catwalks and closets, initially drew me into the game's world. I truly felt like I was in the bowels of a television studio that had been hastily abandoned for the night. The placement of a bucket and sponge, the mangling of the maintenance closet, and the hastily taped piece of cardboard to the roof clearly suggested someone had attempted to remedy the leak, but clearly, I had been left with the cleanup of the failed attempt. Together with the voice of the protagonist and the mood meter, I knew was pretty pissed about it. All in all, an excellent way to motivate the player and capture his/her attention.
<blockquote>"Cripes, that one was close. Did a cow just explode? " <strong>--The 12:45 to Asgard</strong></blockquote>
Unfortunately, what happens <em>after</em> you attempt to fix the leak that sends the game into its literal death spiral. Task complete (?), you plummet into the second part of the game, a journey into the afterlife where neither your environment nor goals have the cohesiveness they did in life. Perhaps that's the point, but unfortunately, the actual technical implementation of this portion of the game is so shoddy that afterlife seems more like an afterthought.

The first issue appears in the form of the second NPC you encounter, Polly

This is where the game spirals downward, for the implementation of the afterlife seems to be an afterthought.