| 5 star: | | (49) | | 4 star: | | (65) | | 3 star: | | (33) | | 2 star: | | (8) | | 1 star: | | (4) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 160
Write a review |
Previous | << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >> | Next | Show All - cmdrfalafel, September 26, 2011
- madducks (Indianapolis, Indiana), September 9, 2011
- LaFey (Porto, Portugal), July 15, 2011
6 of
8 people found the following review helpful:
Stunned, July 6, 2011I literally sat in stunned silence after completeing this piece of interactive fiction. My reaction to this game was impounded by the fact that I'd got confused with the zfiles I'd downloaded and thought that I was playing an old Scott Adams game. How wrong could I have been.
This was my first experience of a puzzleless 'game'. The warnings given by the author were very appropriate (although I only read them after I finished), although I'm not sure if it's children who need the warnings.
Disturbing and thought-provoking. I knew I wasn't playing the game I thought I was when I started having philosophical conversations with mythical beasts. Personally I wasn't so keen on the menu based conversations, but they were approprite for this piece. The typos didn't really detract from my immersion in the storyline.
I never guessed what was actually going on until the very end. It's good to see that interactive fiction is being used to explore darker territory. It's hard to say whether I'd recommend this game. But for mature adults who are willing to be disturbed and provoked, then yes, it is an important piece that deserves recognition.
Now to get on with playing 'Voodoo Castle' (the game I meant to play!)
- JK51242, June 12, 2011
- BladeL, June 7, 2011
- MKrone (Harsleben), May 1, 2011
- Joshua Wilson, April 25, 2011
- rootmos (Stockholm, Sweden), April 11, 2011
- WidowDido (Northern California), March 28, 2011
4 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Choose Your Own Damnation, March 27, 2011More than any other IF work I've played, The Baron's reputation precedes it. I knew that it was going to be pretty dark. (Spoiler - click to show)I knew that the protagonist was going to be loathsome. I knew that sexual child abuse was going to be involved. The game itself does a thorough job of warning you about it. So I wasn't shocked by any of it -- but it's still a very powerful piece.
The Baron could have been rendered, without losing very much by way of interactivity, as a CYOA. Virtually all of the significant interaction comes in the form of menu choices, and the elements that are not menu choices could have been trivially rendered as such. It's almost stateless. By a formal definition of IF, it isn't much of a game. But the expectation of inhabiting the world, IF-style, is a very powerful tool for identifying with the protagonist. The danger of a ream of menu choices, particularly if they're tough or uncomfortable ones, is that the player will detach and be pushed out of the world: which defeats the entire point of rendering serious material in an interactive form.
The Baron is not particularly striking in the questions it poses: it's striking in how it builds up to those questions. A lot of this is independent of the IF/CYOA distinction: it's the Socratic method of framing questions in different ways in a particular order. But a list of checkboxes is easier to blank out than a world that, it's implied, you are going to have to live in. An IF world is one in which you have to engage -- there's a genre expectation that close reading is going to be required to negotiate the world.
It's not perfect; the detaching effect of multiple-choice isn't entirely eliminated, and the pace is quite rapid -- which makes the developing plot less predictable, but also means that you never have to live long with any of your choices.
- Felix Pleșoianu (Bucharest, Romania), March 18, 2011
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 10, 2011
- Buffaloelvis, July 22, 2010
- Simon Christiansen (Denmark), July 8, 2010
- strikemeyer (Atlanta, Georgia), June 12, 2010
- Nusco (Bologna, Italy), May 17, 2010
12 of
12 people found the following review helpful:
Ponder your fate, May 7, 2010(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)The game is conducted in standard text adventure style for movement and interaction. To reinforce that understanding, the first scene of this game takes place in a not-initially-apparent dream where the player is an armored knight encountering a fire-breathing dragon. Outside of that dream, the same play mechanisms are in place, with a few minor exceptions.
Dialog is an important element of the story of the game and as such, it eschews the default “ask about” and “tell X” and instead uses multiple choice to determine what the player will say. There are often four choices to choose from and the responses are not terribly different from each other in tone, but greatly despondent in meaning. The reason for this is that the game uses these discussions as the principal means of determining WHY the player is saying what he is doing. In a way, the game is doing a low-level psychological study on the player through his actions. Instead of giving a report at the end, however, the game uses the player’s responses to subtle guide the remainder of the game to match the rationale behind the player’s actions.
This is an incredible concept, one executed few times before or since because it introduces a very obvious drawback: it causes the scope of the game to increase exponentially. The story branches quickly become innumerable and a single developer will have a hard time keeping up unless they place some pretty strong limitations, which is what Victor did in The Baron.
The game tells a single story where all events have been fixed and there is really only one ending. While that may seem stifling for a game trying to explore the varied motivations behind player actions, it both is and it isn’t. It is rather confining in that no matter if your intentions are noble or cynical, there will never be an opportunity to turn away from your fate.
On the other hand, it is liberating because avoiding your fate isn’t the point of the game.
The protagonist is a father, which, in and of itself, is full of the complexities of raising children but this game narrows down on a single facet of this character: his daughter has been destroyed by the misguided actions of a single man. The game refers to the man as the Baron, and the progression of this game is the father’s attempt to confront the Baron and plead for him to stop and free his daughter.
Each step of the father’s journey, he encounters beasts driven by instincts they find hard or impossible to resist. (Spoiler - click to show)At first he meets a mother wolf who is searching for any food in the cold winter to feed her cubs. Then he encounters a stone gargoyle brought to life but only as a result of feeding on the happiness of others, leaving them bitter and depressed. Finally, you meet the Baron himself, who begs for understanding and sympathy. He admits to being a beast and denies the ability to be anything else.
In the end you reach your daughter and get to talk to her. Through the dialog you have with her, you decide if you have the same determination now as you did when you set forth to confront the Baron or if your vigor has waned. Whether you will let the Baron take her again, or if you will remain vigilant and end the cycle.
It’s a fascinating setup for a dialog over ethics and morality. It’s designed not to challenge your puzzle solving skills but your philosophical stance on conflicted situation. The actions of the Baron are reprehensible, but does his struggle over his nature make a difference in how we perceive him?
As a game, unfortunately, there is less here to be impressed by. It lends itself to two playthroughs on average, one to realize what is going on and see the twist, and a second to make the choices that matter to you. The branching dialog trees aren’t revolutionary, even if they’re not typically used in this manner. The on-rails nature of the game means that if you aren’t intrigued by the initial setup, you will probably be fairly bored by the time you reach the Baron. There is also one point at the ruins near the Baron’s castle where I got fairly turned around because it wasn’t clear to me how certain areas of the ruins connected to each other. So, the one place where the game isn’t strictly linear suffers from slightly muddled navigation.
And then after you complete the game, there is the matter of closure. The game doesn’t offer you answers or even much in the way of a definite future for any of the characters. The point of the game, as I was alluding to before, is to make you, the player, think and feel conflicted, and not necessarily to give resolution to the conflict between the protagonist and the Baron. That’s hard to except, at least initially.
The end of the game is not the end of the story, because the story has no end. Every victory for good or triumph of evil is still just one more day done. Even someone who has done undeniably evil things in the past and holds no hope for redemption, still must face the next day. And even if you decide that the protagonist does succeed in suppressing the Baron that day, he’ll still have to do it again the next day, and the day after, until one of them gives up forever.
- Patrick M. McCormick (United States), May 4, 2010
- Sorrel, April 24, 2010
- Azazel, April 22, 2010
1 of
17 people found the following review helpful:
Boo-hoo!, April 19, 2010+) the plot twist caught me off guard
+) the game is daring, which can really not be said for most IF
-) your moral options are still limited
-) the first 2 conversations in the game have no significance to the plot, the third only indirectly - only the very last is critical
-) some things just MAKE NO SENSE, e.g. what's with the dragon? the motif never reappears! we eventually get he's not a knight, so this dangles in mid air; some things later fall into place, e.g. the diary, but many just lead nowhere and that's a big flaw in such a symbolistic game
-) next time please get some beta testers
-) I deduct 0.5 points for the pathetic WHINING in the readme file: "Give me a low rating rather than playing my game, it's so disturbing!!11
BOO HOO
ever heard of a thing called REAL LIFE?! fiction can never rival actual human cruelty, not even close - just have a look at e.g. the religious crimes commited in our very modern world DAY BY DAY
overall: play it! the standards of Interactive Fiction are so LOW, every game that treats you with half a meaning or new idea is justified to be played!
- Danielle (The Wild West), March 29, 2010
- R4nd0m (Somewhere in time), February 16, 2010
6 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
Some Ideas, Weak Story, February 10, 2010Most of my reactions have already been expressed by previous reviewers, but I wanted to add this: Although the game may or may not work as a psychology test or an exploration of morality, it fails as a story. The exposition is good, and some of the early description drew me in, but as I went on my feeling of being an actor in a fictional world started to fade. By the end I had no sense of urgency; I was making choices as I'd make choices on a psychology test, without any notion that they'd affect characters I cared about.
The problem was illustrated most clearly for me in the last scene, in which the protagonist, who has been repeatedly committing an evil act, is offered the choice of committing that act again or doing something else. The character presumably is driven to commit the act (he's been doing it for a while), but as the player I had no such compulsion. So the game for me went approximately like this:
Game: You are caught in a possibly unbreakable cycle of evil! Do you break it?
Me: y
Game: OK.
If the game had developed its world more thoroughly and made me identify more deeply with the character, that scene would have been troubling to say the least. As it was I just felt like I was pressing buttons.
Previous | << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >> | Next | Show All | Return to game's main page