Ratings and Reviews by Pavel Soukenik
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Romance in a Northwest Café, May 9, 2008A conversation masterpiece, and not just because it is a "conversation only" thing, Best of Three does everything important right: It sets and keeps the atmosphere, provides a superbly characterized and likable protagonist and a life-like NPC as a past romantic interest who is (perhaps intentionally as a clever decision) less likable.
The gameplay is straightforward: You can choose what to say from a menu, change the topics to steer the conversation or just think about things. Occasional physical actions are well infused with significance. (My high expectations were let down only in one case when I wanted to convey a sense of closing the conversation by pocketing the returned pen from the table but the response was the default "Taken.")
Best of Three is not just a conversation, it works as a story. It reveals the background in a way that is not forced, and it serves as a prime example of unobtrusively pacing the conversation and guiding it through the stages the author intended to achieve a meaningful progression and storytelling.
Although I did notice a glitch or two (a topic clarification "the his father") the implementation is very polished to the point where I was confidently typing in "sip cappuccino" just because it felt right. Time advances while you look around or think which limits the leisure feeling and makes the encounter real. I found myself weighing carefully on what to focus my attention next. (Changing topics does not advance time which is good, while trying to think about an irrelevant thing does: this might be converted to an out of world action too.)
Best of Three is a pleasant way to spend an hour or two in a Northwest café (or rather, a "coffee shop") going through your high school relationships.
An interesting experiment, May 6, 2008De Baron deals not so much with actions as with their justifications and rationalization. This is achieved almost exclusively by conversations which happen in menu-based trees. The action of the story is moving steadily along a linear path with some choices to make along the way. What is both good and bad is the fact that the subsequent in-game discussions cover all the options available, which is very interesting but it makes your particular choices seem less important.
The highest point in the whole story is probably the conversation with the gargoyle because it mixes the parable illustration, self-realization and choosing one's attitude to the central problem. That moment's wonderful mastery is slightly undermined by its placement in the story arch, and by the appearance of a similar dialogue that felt (at least in part) superfluous.
Unfortunately, De Baron suffers from an unnecessary problem: typos, particularly in key scenes, are distracting, and the proofreading by an English native speaker would also weed out some of the other translation problems. A more serious problem concerns the design. Outside of conversations, the standard exploration gameplay feels too obvious and you will often mechanically perform actions ("solve puzzles" would not be accurate) that you know beforehand are going to uncover the next piece of exposition.
One way to fix the problems mentioned would be to make the actions and choices matter at the end of the story, have a native English speaker go through the text, redesign the exploration (sparser exposition, removing or enhancing the puzzles) and cut the Baron scene. The last suggestion is maybe radical but that scene contains a lot of what is already obvious and also duplicates some ideas that were already covered.
The experience I was left with was that of filling in an interesting, thinly disguised psychological test but not receiving the results. It is an interesting exercise none-the-less.
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