The interface is extremely well-designed. It's comparatively difficult to make stupid mistakes, and if one does, the mistakes don't interrupt flow enough to cause a major slow-down. The game demands almost no low-information action from the user, either: that is to say, it requires as much clicking and dragging as necessary to communicate your intentions, but no more. Once an order is completed, for instance, pressing the space bar will deliver the order automatically to the person for whom it is intended.

Failure is well-communicated. If you assemble a burger for someone, and then that burger turns out not to be quite right (if for instance you put on tomatoes the customer doesn't want), the wrong element will flash slightly to let you know what's wrong.

Conversely, if you left something out, an outline of the missing element will appear. It's hard to get stuck in a position where you've done something wrong but don't know quite what.

The reward structure is rich and complex. The game keeps track of many, many statistics -- a ludicrous number, really. Many another game awards the player four or five special trophies, but Burger Shop has dozens of them.

The game offers a number of different play styles of different intensities. Story mode is moderately difficult, but there is also a Relax mode in which some of the time pressure is removed, and a Challenge mode in which that pressure is stepped up, instead.

What's more, there's about twice as much content to the Story Mode as most time management games offer, because once you've gone through the regular sequence, there's also an Expert Story sequence retracing the same story track with more difficult gameplay and new cut-scene events at the major junctures.

In just about every respect, then, Burger Shop is designed as a consumer's game. The player is given control of play style to an unusual degree. The range of goals caters allows her to shoot for various kinds of success, and arrive there.

The structure -- with a story mode but many variants of play beyond that -- allow the customer to feel that she's "beaten" the game in about the same amount of time it takes to complete other games of the same ilk, but also allows her to go on to new tasks if she wants to.

(By contrast, I find that most games in this style become pretty stultifying once one has completed each of the levels of play: though they all allow you to replay levels to try to improve the score, I pretty much never want to.)

It's all extremely well-crafted. Well-crafted, but free of independent vision. Every element of game-play is borrowed from other games: customers that get impatient, orders that you assemble from parts, distractions you can offer to customers to pacify them temporarily, upgrades you can buy for your shop, power-ups that make your work faster and smoother for a time. It's all there, and none of it is at all new.

If anything, Burger Shop abstracts away some elements that are usually present by not giving the player a visible avatar in the game: you click on patties and buns to build them into burgers directly. There is no small figure running to and fro to put the pieces together.

I don't intend this entirely as a criticism, though. There's room in the world for works that are perfect in their type, where the type is already long ago defined. Burger Shop pretty much falls into that category.

And what happens to the narrative in this just-about-perfect treatment of the time management mechanic? It becomes the perfect level-based story arc. Since the player has no avatar, the protagonist is even more personality-free than usual. Plot events, such as they are, are all about explaining the new settings and equipment, with no extraneous narrative threads.

There is -- kind of -- a denouement in which we discover where all this burger-constructing equipment has come from. It's not a story to care much about, though, and Burger Shop itself kind of explains why game designers might want to opt out of worrying about a strong narrative: a good story line complicates things. Making the interaction and the plot dovetail together tends to mean that the gameplay cannot be a simple elaboration of a single theme, as Burger Shop's basically is.

Of course, a good story also makes a game different from all the other games sitting next to it. I only need one Burger Shop. But I'd play a whole bunch of games this smooth and polished if they all had different stories.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]