Reviews by bluevelvetwings
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Entertaining..., January 12, 2016...but unfortunately, I found that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Don't get me wrong, the parts are all very nice. The presentation is pretty great - one word at a time, in most cases, with a hyperlink at the end of a series of related words. The story is conveyed with extreme minimalism, and the first part felt quite poetic.
It's a cute idea, and the overall theme it explores is cute, but at a certain point it seemed to lose its charm - (Spoiler - click to show)someone's shooting of one of the girls is abrupt and kind of lame, and it tore me right out of the atmosphere. But not in a good way, like you'd expect from such a twist. Instead, it made me think oh, this is random and sudden and cliché. In fact, tellingly, the suddenness (Spoiler - click to show)actually made me sympathize with the shooter. And the ending felt like a cop-out, after all that.
Plus, repetition kind of bogged the experience down. I understand that these girls are in love; the word kissing three or four times doesn't make me understand it any more. People who are in love do things other than kiss. Maybe it's just me, but the repetition made the experience feel kind of corny toward the end.
I recommend trying it out, though - for all the storytelling flaws I've pointed out, it's definitely unique and worth your four minutes.
I hope you all appreciate this, December 29, 2015This game is actually rather worse than I expected, and that's saying a lot. I think it's a parody, but it's... far less than clear. At points, it seems genuinely racist, and at others pretends to mock racism. I could go into a deep philosophical ramble on the nature of parody, Poe's law, and politics in general, but I'd rather not. I'd rather talk about the game in itself, rather than as a gestalt. I have no wish to meddle in politics - the only reason I played this game is because somebody had to, and somebody had to review it. Not knowing would have killed me. Thus, I'd like to talk about the game aspects of this work, but that's hard.
It's a mess. The grammar is poor, and the design in general is poor - more often than not, lines of text overlapped each other in my browser, making reading it a nearly impossible task. It doesn't matter what hyperlink you click on, as they all (to my knowledge) lead to the same thing, stretching the definition of "interactive" to its limits. The writing, as I said, is muddled and misguided, and riddled with repetition and punctuation errors. There isn't anything to it that hasn't been done before - done better.
This work is angry and bitter, but not at anyone or anything in particular. The only one it unleashes its full vitriol on is you, the player. Play at your own risk.
And yes, I'm a masochist, before you ask.
Meh., June 30, 2015Very, very meh. There's just about nothing here - at least it's functional, but that's just about the only compliment I can summon. There are grammar errors, as well as some things that I think were probably spelling errors (does anyone name their child "Bell"?). It doesn't even take a minute to play through to find all the endings (none of which I personally cared for, since they lacked any sort of impact), but the font is so big that you'll have to scroll down to get through a single sentence at times. Very linear, very bland. But I was expecting that going in, given the description.
For people looking to play the game: you can probably skip this one. This review is mostly meant for the author. In the future, author, if you're going to make a game as linear as this one, you'll have to have better prose rather than one-sentence screens.
Eh., March 6, 2015As an author ((on the side) who definitely has struggled with writers' block before) I felt like this game COULD have struck home with me, especially as it goes downhill in the latter segment. But it didn't. It felt self-pitying, "look at how badly I treat myself just to write stories for you!". It's more of a rant than anything else, though an occasionally well-written one, but I can't get behind its sentiment in the least. That's a danger everyone exposes themselves to when they rant; you run the risk of turning people off - and the game did that for me.
Also, the formatting is somewhat unpleasant on the eyes. I understand that it's supposed to be a dig at Twine's typical formatting, but as someone who can't quite understand the hate for the default, it seemed quite overbearing.
The prose is decent, and the author seems to be technically experienced, but... sorry, just doesn't do it for me.
Whiny and embittered with no real value, March 6, 2015As someone who is working very hard at getting my J.D. in the US, I find this game nothing short of nasty and vengeful. As narrow in scope as it is in mind, it's not an accurate simulation by any means, and is more of a vent piece than anything else.
If you want to click through someone else's whining, then sure, by all means, play it.
If, however, you want to play a game, have any goals in life, have hope for yourself, don't fit into one of two categories (ignorant or materialistic), or don't want to put up with someone who talks like your whiniest drunk friend, leave it alone.
And yes, I'm also bitter with this game, and a bit whiny about it, but I'm also right.
Spoiler alert: this game has no good end.
Other spoiler alert: life might have a good end. If you keep trying.
Meh., November 29, 2014This game feels more tired than anything. There's nothing new about any of it - none of the points of view explored are groundbreaking; everything has been done far better before. The choices are extremely limited and largely unappealing even in a storytelling sense. Prose is weak at best, incredibly bland at worst. I might have given it a 2 star rating, because the author seems to have at least tried, but because of my personal opinions I only gave it 1 star (I hated the art style).
Nevertheless, if you've never played a 'guy does stuff' game... this will probably be new to you? Maybe entertain you for the 45 seconds it takes to play it? There are better offerings out there, though, so I can't really recommend it even on that strength.
Decent, October 5, 2014This isn't a bad game by any means. It was well-put-together in all technical ways, sufficiently scary, and the mechanic of moving on rather than getting a game over was quite well-implemented and added a lot to the story.
But unfortunately, just being "not bad" doesn't make something GOOD. The writing is filled with too much prose - it was never entirely overbearing, but it felt a little amateur and made me want to roll my eyes rather than be scared. I felt that also, given the aforementioned (Spoiler - click to show)repeating of the night over and over maybe the descriptions of things could have changed more significantly than just the text at the beginning of the night. Felt like I was being TOLD I was sinking into madness without it actually being executed that way. I just ended up skipping over most text in future nights rather than reading every day.. In most game formats, this would be absolutely no trouble (only a minor annoyance) - but with an interactive fiction, the entire point is reading and atmosphere, so it was notable that something COULD HAVE been done here.
But it's a solid effort, and it's worth the ten-fifteen minutes it'll take you to find an end.
press the cremation button, September 14, 2014This game. This is a good game. This game sticks with you for way longer than most games lauded as "amazing" or "touching" do. Play this game, play all the (well, most) routes.
Thanks for listening pal
A New Favorite, August 25, 2014Though perhaps not as a game, per se, but as a work of fiction. For me, it holds tension and atmosphere throughout, and it doesn't fall into the typical Lovecraftian IF trope of decaying toward the end with some monster appearing (a move which is not particularly horror-inducing in almost all cases, even in better games). At least, it didn't in my ending. I was also pleasantly surprised at how naturally the experience played out - I never felt like I was guessing the verb at any point, rather behaved completely naturally for the situation, and the parser responded nicely. I didn't follow the commands in the early part of the game, and I still almost always got responses to what I would do naturally in the situation.
All in all, I found this surprisingly good, and it's one of the better Lovecraftian IF, in my book.
Eh, January 9, 2014This short game has an okay premise, with an okay set of concepts it wants to get across. The prose is okay, the options are okay. But the choices you make seem to have absolutely nothing to do with the ending you get - (Spoiler - click to show)I sat on the curb so I'm a 'zombie' now? Really?. That ending was just so out of left field that I sort of blacked it out of my memory, since nothing else in the rest of the game was even similar. That alone could have brought it down a star, but it wasn't big enough for that. Still, that example gives you a good idea of how the game felt - my choices meant nothing to the storyline, and that was almost frustrating.
If it were handled cleverly, I think that it could be an excellent game in the vein of Rameses, where you feel trapped by the overhyped American dream. But it wasn't handled cleverly - it didn't bash you over the head with the message, but instead flew quickly in the opposite direction and had absolutely no import. It was almost frustrating, but it actually failed to evoke any response in me at all. It wasn't quite good enough to be called 'stark' or 'gritty' either, but since I could see that the author was definitely trying something a little new I think this game deserves better than one star. It's just not very good, and only memorable because it could have been so much better.
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