Aisle

by Sam Barlow profile

Slice of life
1999

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5 star:
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4 star:
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2 star:
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Number of Ratings: 319
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- Aryore, December 13, 2015

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting and short, but kinda boring, November 29, 2015

I didn't feel very invested in the characters. The behavior and insanity of the protagonist doesn't help with this. I don't feel like I can really figure anything out because the narrator is unreliable, and I don't really feel like the personal experience of the narrator has any relevance to me because I'm not insane. But, most of all, I found the absence of challenges to be the biggest reason for not enjoying this very much.

I play games to have fun, and one of the biggest sources of fun for me is being engaged in solving problems and overcoming challenges. When you take that away from a game, you'd better have a really darn good case for me to want to play this game as opposed to the many, many other games out there that DO have that engagement. This game doesn't provide a good enough alternative to that.

After playing without a guide and figuring out enough of the story, I went through and tried all the commands in the walkthrough. There's certainly some fun in that, with how many different commands are implemented, but it's just not structured in a way that makes it interesting. The lack of a goal makes it particularly problematic.

This game reminds of Her Story. You have to piece together what is going on by watching short video clips. I think Her Story is basically a better version of this game because it actually has a goal and actually has a flow and pace to it. Stuff changes in the "meta" game as you discover important bits of information. Having, at the very least, a meta layer might've made Aisle more interesting for me.

All of that aside, it's quite short and you can play it in the space of an hour. This, alone, is it's most redeeming quality (and I don't mean that in the sense of "it's great it's short because it SUCKS"). It gives you a complete, fully-realized, unique experience all in the course of an hour.

I give this three stars because, despite my lack of engagement with it, it was short and unique. I would recommend this, because what do you really have to lose with a game this short?

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- jmmelko, October 20, 2015

- KingofSushi, October 12, 2015

- nonnamethankyou, September 29, 2015

- Harry Coburn (Atlanta, GA), September 21, 2015

- Ivanr, September 4, 2015

- Thomas Bøvith (Copenhagen, Denmark), July 15, 2015

- Monsieur Bouc (France), June 22, 2015

- thebloopatroopa, May 28, 2015

- chux, May 20, 2015

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
An Incredible Piece of Experimental Game Design, March 23, 2015

Aisle is such a simple and well executed idea that absolutely everyone in the IF community must have been kicking themselves when it came out that they'd not have thought of it sooner.

Basically, Aisle was the first "one move" text adventure. The game gives you a very simple set-up - you are standing in the aisle of a supermarket, then asks you to perform one action at which point the game will end. This may seem like it has the potential to run into gimmickry but the way it "plays the player" works so well that I can only refer to it as a one of the most inventive games I've ever played.

The endings range from the absurd, funny, mundane to the moving, some of which are exceptionally well written and others which aren't so, but it's the way the game forces the thought process in finding the endings which is what makes the game so great.

At first while thinking of different actions and endings to take, the game seemed rather cute and I began by thinking of pretty standard things, but as I went on I began to think of darker and darker things (not necessarily in an "immoral" way, just in a "wow, did I really think that?" kind of way), some of which I was hesitant to even type in to the interface not only in anticipation of how the game would react but also because I didn't want to admit I'd thought of anything so disturbing. It also becomes hard to drag yourself away from the game. In one session in this game I spend about an hour and a half thinking of endings and came out feeling emotionally drained and guilty about the way my mind works.

Aisle isn't the cute, gimmicky game I originally pinned it down as at all. It's a way of letting you explore how your mind works in a completely innocuous situation within the anonymity and detachment of the artificial world and that is disturbing as hell. I spent my time afterwards wondering whether or not that's how I would really react with no social inhibitions and whether or not the human condition does have these repressed natural thoughts about both ourselves and others which games allow us to enact out in a safe space. And the beauty and/or blunt callousness of which some of the endings are written only made this worse.

Either way, Aisle is such a fantastic experimental piece and a remarkable artistic achievement. Despite it's seemingly simple concept, it's a far deeper and more nuanced piece of game design than I originally thought on hearing about it. In fact, it's one of the most ingenious and creative pieces of game design in any game I have ever played.

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- Thrax, March 11, 2015

- ghost_user, February 25, 2015

- Deka, February 18, 2015

- hoopla, February 12, 2015

- CMG (NYC), February 2, 2015

- dutchmule, December 23, 2014

- Catalina, November 30, 2014

- EllaClass, November 5, 2014

- Matthew Darby (London, United Kingdom), September 20, 2014

- Sobol (Russia), September 12, 2014

- nosferatu, August 27, 2014

- wolfbutler (Canada), July 9, 2014

- Simon Deimel (Germany), May 28, 2014


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