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Confessional Depressional, March 2, 2014A game like I'm Fine is pretty hard to assess as a game. It's the hypertext monologue of a young gay man suffering through the most grinding lower layers of depression and hopelessness. Player choices are along the lines of ‘Take the call’ or ‘Ignore this person’, and as per the level of dysfunction of the character, tend to make little difference to his life. If you do take someone's call, you're not doing so with the wherewithal to exact a change on your existence. The communication is likely to be totally ineffectual, still drizzled with the protagonist's conviction that all is useless. I wouldn't expect otherwise from someone in this state. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
Comments on this reviewPrevious | << 1 >> | Next streever, December 1, 2013 - Reply I am with you--I also read this game and declined to review. I think ultimately it doesn't work as a game, and could have benefited from a different approach. My Father's Long, Long Legs seems to be an allegorical work about depression which succeeds dramatically at giving us a different perspective or view, and it does so without simply listing a series of emotions and feelings. I think this type of work would benefit from following a basic rule of all writing for an audience--show, don't tell. A reasonably intelligent person should intuit that answering the phone is irrelevant in this game. The game shouldn't state it--it should let you answer the phone and let you see that it is useless by the lack of an impact. A bit of a downer, perhaps, but I just find any nascent sense of immersion completely shattered when I read lines like, "It doesn't matter anyway" etc. If I try to repeat the useless action, I'd expect a more straight-forward response from the game. Perhaps the second time I click answer, something like, "Why? To hear a few meaningless platitudes from a shallow friendship? You decline the call instead." I don't mind my agency being stripped away from me, but I do mind being told how I feel or what my emotional state is. I prefer being left to experience the emotions on my own as a direct result of my input. If a confessional isn't a good narrative to do that in, I think that confessional would benefit from being communicated in a more linear format--like a diary entry twine, where you can only read on, or seek greater exposition. Hanon Ondricek, December 1, 2013 - Reply Previous | << 1 >> | NextI played this game also, and decided not to review. It does almost seem like a journalistic expression of personal feelings. And if that is something this medium (both IF and Twine) can help someone express, I think it's succeeded without assigning some type of score. Different people like different things. Some of the agency or lack of might be a snapshot of this character's mind at the time. What's difficult is many people go into an interactive story wanting to "win" or at least make some choices that might improve the outcome. In these slice of life games with slightly blurrier plot arcs I would guess the art is in the detail and the journey you get to an ending. |