Varicella is a puzzle with no clues. The maze that is the story line confuses the first time reader and has no easy to find path. Although the reader is given a task to complete, they have no idea how to achieve this goal. How are they to understand that they need to remember codes and visit certain people in a certain order? Being unable to travel easily through the story hinders the enjoyment for some and does not offer encouragement for those who have trouble understanding it. The lack of detail is also a hindrance. The similarities between some of the places in the text, such as the antechambers and the staircases, bewilder the reader into thinking they are somewhere they are not, making the experience of reading the text a hard thing to do. As an interactive fiction, Varicella does give the reader an interactive experience. There are many decisions to make which take the reader through a different story each time they read the text, even if they change only one choice they have made. The changeability of the text, dependant upon the readers decisions, is important to the form of the text but is very confusing to those who are not used to the structure the text is in. Should the reader change their mind and want to retrace their steps it is not as easy as they thought it would be. Becoming lost and confused as to where one is and where they want to be is not a strange occurrence.

Using a walk through, or writing a bread-crumb-like walk through as one proceeds through the text, helps a novice get through this text that has no direction. But this does deflect from the enjoyment that one can get from a text, any text, because there is not much fun in following instructions. The fun comes from working it out for oneself.