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- Tabitha / alyshkalia, January 18, 2024
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Roadtrip Pause, January 2, 2024Exhausted after a long drive through the desert, you and your girlfriends pull up to a dilapidated motel. A good night's sleep will get you ready for the next day of driving and visiting the sights.
But then the neon cactus flower blooms, and the Cactus Blue Motel proves to be very enticing. Maybe you'll prolong your stay. Just for a day or two...
The visual presentation of this game is spot-on. Clean white-on-black text with a clear layout, and the links presented in a neon-blue, like the billboard out front. It keeps the player aware of the closed-off location that is the motel, with nothing but dark desert surrounding it.
When the plot took a turn into supernatural thriller territory, I was unimpressed at first. I liked it, sure, but it was a bit too reminiscent of Stephen KIng's The Shining to get me deeply involved. Creepy motel with a mind of its own doesn't want the characters to leave. Check. Age-old guests and employees assure you that the motel is the best place to be. Check. Mirages of inviting amenities luring the guests to while away their time for just a bit longer. Check.
The tour of the rooms where you meet the other motel-guests was very promising, with a few memorable characters and scenes. The conversations did get a bit repetitive over time, and I found it hard to distinguish between personalities when their answers to questions about themselves and the motel were so much alike.
The unlocking of a previously inaccesible room provides some much-needed forward tempo, when a talking Jackalope (yes, a talking Jackalope,) asks your help with his investigations into the nature of the motel. It turns out he's sending you on a series of undisguised fetch-quests. I like fetch-quests, but when solving them amounts to a sequence of overclued clicks, my sense of urgency and agency is quite diminished.
Fortunately, Cactus Blue Motel is saved by its heartfelt and (for me) relatable finale. Wrestling free of the Peter Pan fase, refusing to keep clinging to childhood certainties, facing the adult world with all its complexities, dangers, and scary opportunities can be a painful process. The metaphor of steeling your will to escape from the soothing motel (or refusing to, and staying behind...) landed true with me. It helped me remember the 20yo kid I once was, and helped me assure him that it turned out not so bad after all.
- Smallgoth (Seattle, Washington), October 12, 2023
- DawnXEra, September 4, 2023
- Edo, August 23, 2023
- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), August 12, 2023
- lyda01, August 6, 2023
- aluminumoxynitride, July 27, 2023
- Kastel, June 20, 2023
- sugar.freegirl, March 18, 2023
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), October 11, 2022
- Vulturous, May 3, 2022
- Rainbow Fire , August 7, 2021
- KishaC, April 11, 2021
- autumnc, March 12, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Twine pseudo-puzzler with engaging characters, February 1, 2021this one's a real gem -- it's IF in the "existential crisis/surreal location" genre, but for once, the location isn't deserted. the characters in Cactus Blue Motel are interesting people, most of whom one might actually want to get to know, and despite the Twine structure and limited interactivity they come off as nuanced and deep.
there are no mysterious machines, trophy cases to fill, and so on. the "puzzles" in Cactus Blue Motel are generally explorative in nature; where do you go, in what order, and what decisions do you make? they lead carefully and organically towards a single dilemma, and while i feel like the author has a solution in mind, i'm not actually convinced it's the one i'd choose.
just overall fantastic. great writing and pushes Twine to its limits.
- rindy, September 23, 2020
5 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Some places are like people: some shine and some don't, September 7, 2020When I played Night Guard / Morning Star last year I noted that I was captivated by the writing and atmosphere and turned off by the multitude of endings. I feel similarly after playing Dalmady's Cactus Blue Motel and I'll dive further into the reasons why.
The general conceit of interactive fiction is that you are the primary character. The playing character may be a cipher, such as in Zork, or a specific character, such as Maria Elena here. Regardless, you are making decisions for that person.
In a pure puzzler, the author hopes to engage the player in the game's objective. In a comedy, the author hopes to make the player laugh, and character development may or may not be necessary. Drama, I suspect, is the hardest genre for IF authors, as they must make the player care about the characters, unwaveringly, for the entire game. The CYOA format highlights this difficult task, as there are no real puzzles to distract the player.
Dalmady succeeds, as usual, in building a fun atmosphere with compelling characters. A mystical desert motel where time is squishy is ripe for intrigue. But the game's format, unfortunately, usurps the development of Maria Elena. Eight endings are written for Maria Elena and the decisions that impact those endings are based on how you interact with her two friends, Lex and Becky, throughout the game. There are no puzzles and nothing to deduce, so all of the game's real choices are impacted by Maria Elena herself.
For my first playthrough, I made choices for Maria Elena by projecting my desires for her character. Subsequent playthroughs to find different endings required me to project different desires onto her. This requires me, essentially, to divorce myself from how I feel about our protagonist. I am no longer rooting for her, but rooting for myself to find different endings. Dalmady sidesteps the awkwardness a bit by making these choices not impact the course of the plot or even much of the game's dialogue; however, this in turn has the side effect of the eight endings feeling somewhat arbitrary (not to mention a chore to find via repetitive restarts), and Maria Elena's relationships wind up seeming so fragile that a couple of fairly innocuous comments drastically changes the course of their lives.
In the end, the focus on these three characters and their fates detracted from the game's best character, the motel. Such is the bane of CYOA: the focus dedicated to plot branches necessarily gives everything else less importance.
- Xuan Li, July 6, 2020
- Marc-André Goyette, June 20, 2020
- quackoquack, June 10, 2020
- kierlani, April 2, 2020
- Dawn Sueoka, September 27, 2019
- Frederik Cornillie, August 13, 2019
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