| 5 star: | | (143) | | 4 star: | | (257) | | 3 star: | | (108) | | 2 star: | | (19) | | 1 star: | | (5) |
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Number of Ratings: 533
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Previous | << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >> | Next | Show All - Olaf Nowacki (Berlin, Germany), October 24, 2021
- civilstat (Maine, USA), October 21, 2021
1 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Quick, fun, and surprising!, October 10, 2021A short game about getting up in the morning and going to work, but with a twist ending. Plays with your expectations - there are some assumptions you make when you play a parser-based game, and it didn't really occur to me to question them here. Ironically enough, (Spoiler - click to show)when I got to the bit where you leave the house without locking it, I wondered if someone might break in when I was out at work.
If I hadn't been in such as hurry to get to work, I might have done what I normally do in parser games and (Spoiler - click to show)examine everything - in particular, to look under things and behind things. Of course, I did that on the replay.
One bit left me trying to guess a verb: (Spoiler - click to show)"get in cubicle" did the trick.
If I had to give someone a short game to play in order to teach them how to play a parser game, it'd probably be this.
- Malasana, August 16, 2021
- Prosilire (New York City), August 3, 2021
- nf, July 27, 2021
2 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A clever idea in text adventure form, July 26, 2021My nephew and I were amused by this bare-bones vignette in which every turn another minute passes and we're already late and the phone is ringing and ...
We enjoyed the ambiguity of the game and we kept trying to guess the genre. Is it a puzzle to finish the tasks before the time runs out? A Groundhog Day game? A pointed criticism of the banality of corporate cubicle lifetyle? Clearly something was going to happen at some point.
In the end it was amusing but we were annoyed by the sharp edges of the railroaded short story format. Neither of us felt the ends justified the journey, even on a few replays.
- mootstrap, July 19, 2021
- Hellzon (Sweden), July 1, 2021
- bkirwi, May 2, 2021
- proxyfeathers, April 27, 2021
- sw3dish, April 23, 2021
- Karlok (Netherlands), April 14, 2021
- Jonathan Verso, April 11, 2021
2 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A comment on reading conventions, March 24, 2021This is a one-trick game which makes an insightful comment on the conventions which the player uses to interact with the game.
The twist got me, and made me laugh. It's more or less fair, though, as I saw on the second playthrough.
It reminds me of an Orson Scott Card essay on how to read science fiction: the experienced science-fiction reader is looking for the world-building clues in the story as they read, and constructing the world rules, how it works, in their head from the clues dropped in the text. A reader not used to science fiction can get lost, as did some of the students in his course.
The same approach happens when we play an interactive fiction game. There is a process of exploration to figure out the world model. There are also certain conventions, or shorthands -- as there are in science fiction -- where the writer can import a lot of assumptions at once, from previous gameplay (like previous SF), without spelling it all out.
(Spoiler - click to show)9:05 plays a trick with those assumptions.
This also engages with the discussions by many IF luminaries about the coercive nature of game design, where the player is given the illusion of choice but the author is actually restricting the player's options to the preselected ones. This is particularly apparent in second-person media like most IF. In fact, to avoid player frustration, it is standard design advice now to use the text to hint the player in the "correct" direction, and the player usually follows it. Of course, the author can also mislead the player. (Spoiler - click to show)And very elegantly, 9:05 does.
- starlitevenings, March 13, 2021
- knockupwood, February 17, 2021
2 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Was too confusing as a kid - I really like it now though!, December 22, 2020I first played this as a child, years and years ago. It was too confusing for me. I couldn't figure out what to do, how to interact with the objects, where to go. I just kept getting errors.
I came back to it, and now find it very enjoyable!
- Ola (Sweden), December 3, 2020
- Joey Jones (UK), October 19, 2020
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Fun little game to get you acclimated to IF, September 29, 2020This game only takes 10-15 to playthrough once, and I recommend you play through it multiple times. It is useful in getting a new player acclimated to the mechanics of IF, including the frustrating parts like being told you can't do something because of a minor detail you forgot (Spoiler - click to show) like having to specify to take your watch off before getting in the shower.
My first playthrough was over unexpectedly and anticlimactically, but I got to have some fun on subsequent playthroughs. After playing it by yourself a couple times I recommend reading a walkthrough to learn all its secrets. This will help give you an idea of what to look for in future parser-based IF games you might play.
- autumnc, September 11, 2020
- Zape, September 4, 2020
- jvg, September 1, 2020
- Rainbow Fire , August 27, 2020
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