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 its 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 was the one left to cleanup everyone's mess. Couple this with the mood meter and the protagonist's grouchy voice, and you have an excellent beginning to a game.
<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 the afterlife seems more like an afterthought.

After a quick rid with Death across the River Styx, the first technical problems manifest in the form a of little girl:
<pre>&gt;say hello
(to Polly)
"Hello, Polly," you say.

The girl runs over to you and shakes your hand. "Nice to meet you," she says. "I'm Polly."
</pre>
Note that I didn't know the name of the little girl at the time, but the game seems to assume that I do. Yet I don't think I'm supposed to know her name, otherwise why would she run over to me and introduce herself?

Polly also remains mostly unresponsive to inquiries, not an uncommon occurrence in IF, but demoralizing nonetheless. After following her to a series of gem-encrusted turnstiles, I was met with my second technical challenge: How to enter the devices after receiving the appropriate token. Various commands failed to work, including:
<pre>&gt;go through turnstile
(the turnstiles)
They're not something you can enter.
</pre>
At last I opted to "follow polly", which brought me to another devastating bug:
<pre>Inside the farmhouse
Evening supper is being prepared in the kitchen. A fire glows in the front fireplace. 

Polly is here. 

&gt;x fireplace
You can't see any such thing.
</pre>
Polly also remained unresponsive and after awhile, I theorized I had accidentally stumbled into a room I was never meant to enter. It was simply a "holding" room within the game. Upon exiting, I found myself outside a cottage with a locked door. Unable to get back in the place I jut left, I vigorously knocked on the door. Someone who was not Polly shooed me away.

Exploring the area around the cottage left me directionless