Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards
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Familiar Ground, May 26, 2011If you've been running low on anti-American paganistic stories, Sons of the Cherry will recharge your battery. Of course, SOTC features the expected "people born more than 100 years ago are irrational and stupid" sub-theme as well as potshots at Christianity. At least the author knows his audience. I'm a bit mystified as to why he felt it necessary to disguise this in a generic CYOA RPG outfit, though. Those clothes are especially deceptive because they make it seem like you have choices, when in reality, your choices are all illusions.
The plot is on rails -- no matter what you choose, you end up at the same place. Maybe you can die, but I tried a few things and nothing resulted in my death. SOTC is much more of a story than a game, but you still have to select some meaningless choice, and click a button for the plot to proceed. I'm no fan of non-interactive fiction, and SOTC is non-interactive fiction.
The prose style is fairly atmospheric, competent (errors are few), and concise. The game is unscored, and I didn't notice anything that affected your statistics, though you'd think that it would. Maybe you have to finish the game or go much further than I did. I quit early on, after learning that my character was a warlock of some sort.
If you enjoy non-interactive fiction disguised, pro-witchcraft themes with a dose of anti-Americanism, you'll like SOTC.
Experience Without Wisdom, May 22, 2011On the quality of the writing alone, East Grove Hills ranks as stellar. The characters are well-defined, believable, true-to-life, and pitiable, even though the main character (narrator) can be hurtfully sarcastic. The feel is high-school angst captured to a T, without being preachy, ridiculous, or done to excess. You can feel it soaking into your pores, if you've forgotten what it's like, or radiating out of them when the words find their brothers beneath your skin.
However, it's not a game. It's not even a CYOA. The plot has an inescapable chokehold upon the player, and all you can do is go from one scene to the next, as expected. Despite that this is hinted to be part of the narrator's character, it doesn't help alleviate the claustrophobia it induces in the player.
There are some technical problems, too, especially when conversation topics carry over from one scene to the next. I almost felt embarrassed for the author when I discovered that.
The real disappointment of East Grove Hills lies in the possibilities it excludes. Though the main character survives two frightening scenes, nowhere in his mind is a thought of fighting back. Isn't it time that we recognized that madmen intentionally target areas full of helpless people? Just for once, I'd like to see a game that instead of celebrating weakness, panic, or terror in such a situation, turned the tables. East Grove Hills regurgitates the same, stale, familiar theme as though everyone were helpless, instead of individuals possessed of the need to survive and defend their friends.
Worse, no-one seems to learn anything from their experiences. The ending -- if that was its purpose -- ignores the fact that it takes seriously messed-up people to do the things the game mentions; merely being an outcast isn't enough. We're talking years of parental neglect and near-abandonment, in the case of Columbine. Other cases involved use of anti-depressants which can have horrible reverse effects upon teenagers, because they are still physically maturing. As a result, the ending is lackluster.
East Grove Hills is worth playing, if just for the writing quality alone.
Zombie Loses, May 21, 2011This is a one-room experiment in humor or zombie realism, or both. The ending is humorous; the beginning is gross; there's not much between besides the initial groping around figuring out what you are and what you're supposed to eat.
For a game coded in one hour, the prose is surprisingly problem-free. The introduction effectively sets the scene and gets you right into the action, what little there is. There is gore and your initial meal is a bit stomach-churning.
It might be a bit unfair to give this game one star, but it's so limited in what it does, two stars seems madly generous. To be sure, it's a better game than any game in which you "mount car", but to make a bad pun, there's just not enough meat here.
House of Dead Children, May 21, 2011The Sisters begins a little better than your standard horror story; at least you are given a reason for getting to the old mansion. Could the author have made it more atmospheric? Yes. Could the author have cared about grammar, punctuation, and all those fundamentals? You betcha. The overuse of ellipses to end sentences (for maximum spook value, I assume) is particularly grating. Anyhow, the game begins fairly well and does draw you in.
There are some technical problems that can kill you, so be warned. The first of these is a lack of synonyms for a common verb problem -- annoying. (Spoiler - click to show)The next one requires you to close the penknife. This is not optional. If you drop the penknife, even in another room, you will still die if you try to go down the steep decline! The lack of synonyms for common verbs leads straight into guess-the-verb-land for some of the puzzles (none of which are crucial to the plot, fortunately). The Sisters loses points for technical problems that really should have been fixed.
The prose is decent; it's not campy, it's not bad, it's just unfocused. Take this as an example: "You slowly wake, somewhat reluctantly." Occasionally there are little bits of prose satisfaction, such as "...you have a nagging feeling that waking will only complicate things." Jokes are rarer still. The scenes that build the sense of unease are decent; the atmospherics are unoriginal.
The plot is a little bit better than the usual, but it doesn't have the originality (except the end) to make it truly memorable. It does allow you to explore quite a bit and yet provides enough plot to keep you playing. That's worth praising. I have played better-implemented games that couldn't keep my interest alive.
The scoring system feels pinball-esque, in that you're racking up a point here, three points here, and so on. I'm not an enemy of points, but in this game, they seriously disrupted the sense of immersion.
The ending ambushes you and before you have typed more than a few times, the game is over. I'm not sure that winning is possible, and neither am I sure what role score plays here. Would I have achieved a more positive result had I score seventy instead of fifty?
As other reviewers have noted, this is not a Lovecraftian opus; my hat's off to the author for at least trying to be original, even if he did not completely succeed. Altogether, The Sisters is a somewhat interesting game that rewards you with a chilling finale`.
By the Way, You're a Pixy, May 20, 2011Mite is an easy-going, picturesque, coming-of-age sort of fantasy anchored in the section of the literary landscape inhabited by The Wind in the Willows. By the way, you're a pixy. The writing here is nearly flawless and engrossing; never once does mimesis break. After a moment or two, only bodily functions will remind you that you aren't actually trodding beneath the caps of mushrooms or interacting with fey creatures.
The plot may not be original, but it is handled deftly and with authenticity. You are Mite, a young pixy lad who has discovered an egg that belongs to the Prince. Your job -- and your parents insist that you accept it -- is to return the egg. You've never been far from home, but this is your chance to learn about the world and take on the challenges of adulthood.
The puzzles in Mite range from simple to almost nettlesome, but none of them are cruel or overly difficult. The only fault I find with them, in general, is that sometimes the solutions lie in rooms you have yet to explore. The map itself is often linear, and so I was concerned that by going ahead a few rooms would result in losing the game. Besides that, they rank as some of the most true-to-the-game, immersive, organic, and satisfying puzzles in the history of IF.
Unfortunately, Mite does have a few typos and grammar problems that prevent it from being a five-star game. None of these make the game unwinnable or foul up your ability to solve any puzzles. They are just unexpected defects, like the cup holder in your new car coming loose as you round a bend. Also, the conversation system is the primitive ask/tell. Conversational purists will probably dislike Mite for that alone, but fortunately, the game manages to soften the impact of those restrictions.
Mite is not too easy, and not too hard. It is packed with memorable encounters and leads to a satisfying conclusion. It touches on various enduring themes, and does so with grace, class, and innate nobility. In short, Mite is a class act from start to finish. Brava, Sara Dee.
Political Kabuki Theatre, May 18, 2011The intro and the first few rooms of this game are amazing, as it describes a world that exists only as hateful fantasy. "No rhyme or reason"? Uhm, that doesn't make sense. No-one bothers to go to the effort to track, arrest, and imprison someone on a whim; every action has a reason.
Curiously, the author reveals virtually nothing about the main character. That arouses natural sympathy in the player's breast, but I find it disingenuous and cowardly. The backdrop is the war on terror; the character begins by escaping a cell; and the prison is apparently a "rendition" facility (no, the character is not Pvt Manning). The main character is most likely a jihadist Muslim. So the odds are on whatever he was doing having something to do with murdering a lot of people.
"How will they know that you're telling the truth?" If the implication holds, the author demonstrates shocking ignorance of "taqqiya" -- the deception of your enemy if it preserves your life or advances the cause of Islam. This is a common tool in the jihadist toolbox.
"Low value" does not mean "not part of anything," as the author suggests, revealing her ignorance of intel. "Low value" means "not likely to yield actionable evidence". Beyond that, the game offers up another unrealistic scenario: the government knew they couldn't get anything from the prisoner, but kept him anyways? That simply wouldn't be done -- unless you're inclined to believe the stories told by taqqiya-mouthing jihadists. By this point, I'm laughing. Really, how can you make a game where you know nothing about the world you're trying to model?
The information that you find about the procedures apparently is so controversial that it will prove your innocence. And this information is about...wait for it...the PrOcEdUrEs. Hurry, someone call the ACLU. They'll get right on those panties on your head and other forms of psychological fake-out marketed as "torture"!
For further evidence that the main character is a jihadist -- or possibly, an anarchist, try examining the corpses; both place the same low value upon human life. Here Out of the Pit edges up to eliminationist rhetoric.
As you keep going, you find misspellings and the usual purple prose (consider the laptop and its pieces). There is no challenge from a puzzle perspective, either. The single puzzle is painfully easy to solve, and escaping the prison is also mindless, requiring just the ability to type compass directions.
For a game that presumes to be deadly serious, Out of the Pit fails catastrophically. It's political kabuki theatre.
At Least PUTBAD Was Funny, May 16, 2011This game consists of an entirely nondescript one-room plane that you are in -- not a seat or stewardess to be seen -- and an annoying sister who repeats the same thing every turn. For some inexplicable reason you have a survival kit in your purse. No verbs do anything except wait. So you wait and wait and wait until you get tired of waiting and then you quit.
If this game is actually an interactive life experience, maybe we are all on planes, stuck in a game with a title that means nothing, surrounded by annoying people that we want to shut up but can't -- ok, I give up. This game has no meaning and no satisfaction. At least Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die was funny.
No, No, No, Please No., May 16, 2011From the first paragraph, you know this game will be bad. Scary Caps, grammar problems, and point of view problems scream off the screen. The content? Well, it fits.
The game channels the spirit of low-grade slasher/gore films, and the setup is strictly by the numbers: teens meet in an out of the way place to drink and have sex. Monster shows up. Dead bodies ensue. Sure, the girls have mildly humorous names, but that's it for camp -- besides the hackneyed plot.
Technical problems abound. You can't actually converse with anyone (getting no response from attractive women would be realistic, but not from your friends); you can drink an endless amount of beer and never get drunk or have to pee; you can't drive your own car.
Advancing the plot means a lot of waiting. It's like watching one of those lame movies and having to hit the play button every few moments. Ugh. Also, the number of profanities is off the charts. Double ugh.
I agree with RandomExile's comments about the plot being on rails, although that may be too gracious. The plot is in a straitjacket. Maybe that was the point, so that you could role-play one of those imbeciles who sits around and waits to be carved up by the monster. This is especially frustrating in one of the character's death scenes, where you just sit by and watch. This might be fiction, but it's sure not interactive.
Hallow Eve is nasty, boring, not funny, and not self-aware. In short, it's just like a Friday the 13th film -- best off avoided.
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