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Number of Reviews: 6
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1-6 of 61 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
A four part game about Soviet sadness and Stalin, May 4, 2016In this game, you play through 4 separate vignettes. Each one is a short, description-heavy vignette of someone in Soviet Russia. The vignettes increase in the social status of the pc.
The game is fairly serious, with some elements of parody, intentional or not.
The gameplay is fairly smooth and polished. Many people have said in reviews that they couldn't finish the game; however, every scene can be completed by either repeating some repetitive task (such as waiting) or making sure to explore each area thoroughly. The way you die usually tells you what to do next time.
Despite the heavy-handedness, the game worked for me. The last scene had a large amount of strong profanity, so I don't think I'll play again.
Also, at one point the game seemed bizarrely broken until I realized that it was displaying chess notation.
3 of
12 people found the following review helpful:
Too much bad language, April 18, 2016I didn't play very far, but I talked to the beggar and the swearing was terrible, so I quit. I have no idea if the game was any good otherwise.
0 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
It would have been better had the misery been *interesting* misery, April 14, 2013This is a piece about "living under the Stalin era, in four parts." I'm going to be a touch spoilery here, but just a touch. After all, I played this several times, but never lasted more than thirty moves, so I can't possibly be spoiling your immersive experience that much.
(Spoiler - click to show)I died of starvation once, but then I started plowing potatoes and grain like a mad man so that I'd be ready when they came to collect my share for Mother Russia. No matter how industrious I was, though, I was always pinned to the ground, called an enemy of the collective, an enemy of the people, an enemy of Russia, and killed. I'm not sure if it was a bug or what, because I always had more grain and potatoes than the game said I needed, even after feeding my dying wife whom I couldn't bring myself to euthanize... because somehow, someway, I knew we would survive.
Yes, life in Stalinist Russia is horrible, but you get a sense of this about ten or fifteen moves into the piece and the rest of the game is not terribly interesting after that. I mean, I admire the premise, and the ambition of it, but I think it could have been done in a more engaging way. Bit more of a plot. Bit more promise that the misery to come would at least be interesting misery. More than four beta testers next time, Michelle.
This wasn't bad, per se, it just wasn't good. If you're going to take us back in time and show us how miserable a certain period was, you have to make it engaging enough that people will actually want to stay in the Hell you've (re)created for them.
And I didn't get far enough into this one to figure out where the title came from, which made me sort of sad. But they kept killing me!
3 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
Kentucky Fried Anti-Communist Tract...until the end, November 19, 2011I've suffered through a few Ayn Rand books. This game's better than they are, and not just because it's a lot shorter. It makes Stalin a more fun person than the people he repressed, which is rather clever, but unfortunately it stacks the deck.
Gigantomania's broken into four parts. Three require repetition and fawning to the local bureaucrat, and the fourth pretty much ignores what you try to say. It's the best one. There's always a trick to books showing people's lives are tedious without bringing the reader in, and in the case of a game, having to repeat actions to get to the next bit is just crushing.
That's the first half of the game. But then it turns toward being able to sneak around as you get more power--the (Spoiler - click to show)interrogation scene offering some wonderful, revealing ways to lose. But unfortunately anyone who has read why Communism failed will probably know this. And anyone who hasn't may wonder if all this repetition's necessary.
But the final scene is quite simply very clever. It's a chess game, and it's worth playing for that alone. I'd always interpeted "Communist style" chess as something different--the art of only allowing small advantages nobody enjoyed, more like a typical Karpov-style win where you mess up your opponents' pawns and win a tedious eighty-move rook and pawn endgame.
Here the author made the right decision. The interpretation (Spoiler - click to show)of killing all your allies to bring the enemy king near yours for the final evil laugh is wonderful and expedient. I didn't see it right away. It's the best anachronism I've seen in IF (Stalin died in '53, but the game occurred 40 years later.)
If the game could have a running side-story as clever as the last bit for each of its four parts, it would feel a lot less like Kentucky Fried Anti-Communist Tract and more like something special. I'd replay it for sure.
5 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
Lacks smoothness; makes up for it with inventiveness, October 27, 2011Gigantomania is a fascinating piece written by an inexperienced but inventive IF designer. The 5.24 average rating it got in the IF Competition is completely undeserved: this game is worth playing and also worth thinking about. I cannot understand why anyone would give it a 4 or lower, which is apparently what almost 30% of the judges have done.
Gigantomania was entered in the same competition as The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game, with which it shares the theme of communism. Apart from that, the two games are polar opposites. Glorious is a highly polished light-hearted puzzle game that does not take its theme seriously and brings us nothing in the way of innovative design; Gigantomania lacks polish and smoothness, but it takes its theme very seriously indeed and experiments with the medium in quite unexpected ways. If the former is a slick Hollywood production, the latter is an experimental art house movie that sometimes works and sometimes does not.
This characterisation should give you a good idea of whether you want to play the game or not, which is the only thing I want to do in this review. Everything else I have to say about the game would be so full of spoilers that the IFDB is not the place to post it.
1 of
8 people found the following review helpful:
Revealing, but Neither Game Nor Story, May 29, 2011To be sure, Gigantomania is realistic. You can feel it in your pores like sodden air. It also authentically Russian, with realistic detail, and all manners of dark humor and deception. However, as a game, Gigantomania falls short.
The plot slowly unfurls the corrupt nature of communism in every strata of society across separate scenes, linked together only via the main characters as types of workers that embody that failed totalitarian system. Although that abstract (instead of personal) linkage may well radiate the cold cruelty of Stalin's Russia, it does not build a strong plot. It also dries up the wells of sympathy which are engaged when you know more of the character by being in his or her skin for an appreciable length of time.
The puzzles themselves are fairly easy except for the ending puzzle in the third scene, which I could not solve; that there is a fourth scene suggests that this is possible, although it would be far more realistic if there were there no solution -- making every ending a win, or perhaps a loss.
Grammar problems occasionally crop up in Gigantomania, but there are no coding errors that I discovered. In the first scene, depending on what you do, you will find a character that delivers a horribly profane monologue. While I understand his desperation, it says little for the authors' creativity that they chose to reveal it in this way. I could easily conceive of his words delivered through clenched teeth as being more forceful without such.
In the end, I'm not sure how well Gigantomania works as a game; it is like several mini-games in one, connected abstractly to one another. The subject matter is a very much overlooked era of history, but this and the oppressive atmosphere still don't compensate for the lack of unity and the lack of plot. So, my hat's off for the authors sticking a thumb in the eye of those who whitewash history, but I hope that they pay more attention to game aspects in future releases.
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