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Number of Reviews: 4
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1-4 of 46 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
You spin me right round, September 9, 2020With a Kafkaesque dystopia the author must be very careful that while the world is constantly spinning around the protagonist that the viewer in addition to being misdirected doesn't feel cheated. For the most part Finley does his job here.
I played this twenty years ago and played it again just recently (because I had honestly forgotten most of it) and was swept away both times. I have generally enjoyed frequent plot twists as long as they're fun (e.g. Wild Things) and don't negate everything that came before (e.g. The Game). Multiple times while playing Kaged I thought to myself "Hey, this isn't logical" (Spoiler - click to show) like when the guard was conveniently asleep knowing that in this government that would be dangerous), or the code on the matchbook for no reason and then it would be revealed later that I was correct and the inconsistency was intentional. I also felt like many of the plot twists were foreshadowed so that I didn't feel cheated at the end. (Spoiler - click to show)My favorite was being told that the Commissar had front-row seats to the execution, very cheeky. I also figured out the final twist with about five minutes of play time left (Spoiler - click to show) because of all the cameras which was a brilliant move by Finley. Throughout the game I felt empowered and thrilled by the chase, until right near the end where I felt powerless but compelled to press on. The parallels between the story and my experience as a player were often step for step.
My only critique of the structure was the ability to die at several different points along the way. While I understand that seemed necessary to conceal the ending, it feels like in retrospect that those ways of ending the story do indeed negate the final ending.
Many have commented that the puzzles are poorly clued. I frequently use walkthroughs while playing and I didn't have to resort to one here. And I felt many of the puzzles were heavily clued (Spoiler - click to show)(the armband one especially, and even how to help the boy) but your mileage may vary. However, there is one structural issue (Spoiler - click to show) being allowed to access the 10th floor before helping the boy that killed the plot flow a bit early on.
Finley's writing is, as always, a treat and despite the game's flaws I was happy to be along for the ride.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A surreal, horror-futuristic game with some thriller scenes, July 5, 2017I have to make one big admission up front: I played Kaged with a walkthrough almost straight through. I had heard some of the puzzles were unfair, and the story seemed great, and so I just read it as a short story.
This worked surprisingly well. It makes for a great short story. You are a bureaucrat in a complicated futuristic society where everything is tightly regulated and disturbing. You are asked to help stop a menace in this world.
The game deals with the nature of reality and with mind-bending. A pretty crazy game.
Edit: The original version of this game, played on HTML Tads, has great music and graphics. Really worth playing.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Not what I was expecting from a Dystopian piece, January 8, 2016by mjhayes (Somewhere east of Garinham) I entered into this story, expecting an interactive story not unlike 1984. It certainly seems to start off that way. You play as a minor bureaucrat working in a huge government tower. People have been going mad lately, most recently your immediate supervisor - and the story begins with your having an appointment with the Grand Inquisitor.
Sounds interesting when you begin, and there are a few interesting puzzles, a couple of which I thought were a little unfair. The first is (Spoiler - click to show)what it takes to get into the Bureau of Records - (Spoiler - click to show)there are two solutions, both of which remind me of the kind of tough puzzles commonly hurled at players back at the time this piece was written. The second is (Spoiler - click to show)sabotaging the security system for the prison doors. In all likelihood, you'll have to backtrack at least once for an important clue or item, leaving someone waiting. To be fair, the author did write the story to make it impossible to get into an unwinnable state, and does give the player ample opportunity to avoid death, so you don't have to worry so much about save scumming.
At one point, you're faced with a choice whether to continue the story or let it end. If you slug it out to the end, you'll discover (Spoiler - click to show)there are no good endings. You can either die or spend the rest of your life in a mental hospital, where you will receive regular electroshock "treatment." So having ended the game halfway through is really the closest thing to a good ending there is.
What I was hoping for in a true story of the Orwellian genre, was a large back story about how oppressed the citizens are and how thoroughly corrupt the government has become. There's hardly any of that here. Instead, you ultimately learn that the spreading madness (Spoiler - click to show)is fabricated by the Inquisitor himself, who is implanting people with Augmented Reality gear and projecting sounds and "three-dee" images that only one person hears or sees, and then using that as "evidence" of their loss of sanity and putting them away in the State Hospital. All that because (Spoiler - click to show)attendance at the public execution trials has been declining lately, and so all the time you spend in the latter part of the story, (Spoiler - click to show)breaking out of prison cells and running away from guards, was all staged in advance. You had become an unwitting contestant in a game show of life-or-death.
If the story had been advertised for what it is, and didn't lead me to believe it was an actual interactive struggle against a totalitarian regime, then I would have liked it better. The length of the game is just right in my opinion, not too short and not too long, and there aren't too many puzzles. It's worth a couple hours of your time, and that's all.
8 of
10 people found the following review helpful:
Orwellian darkness, October 21, 2007Not all of the puzzles in Kaged feel fair or well-clued, and this is a pity, because the game is otherwise very effective. You play a minor bureaucrat in the justice system of a vast and overbearing state, trying to understand a series of recent disturbing events. The architecture of the setting, the behavior of the other characters, and the unfolding of the plot all work together to create a sense of oppression and fear, which only grows stronger as the game plays out.
Kaged is illustrated with a handful of surreal images, which do more to strengthen the mood than to explain anything.
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