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Nice, long story, but forced my hand too much for my liking, November 20, 2015by dutchmule This game takes a while to complete, about an hour and a half, which I think makes it the longest Twine game I've ever played. I must admit I wasn't too invested in the storyline; the game deals with being a female pop star and being in a polyamorous relationship, which aren't topics that I'm too familiar with: the former is pretty broad, saying that you are in a stable of other female pop stars (which felt like inspired by J-Pop or K-Pop) and have to keep working to achieve #1, and the latter takes most of the space, with mostly linear segments about the relationships in the 4-way you're a part of. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
Comments on this reviewPrevious | << 1 >> | Next Doug Orleans, November 21, 2015 - Reply The fact that the author's previous IFComp game Venus Meets Venus had zero branching, and that the first few choices in this game either have no visible effect or are explicitly ineffectual, made me also suspect that this was going to be strongly linear. But in the alloted 2 hours of judging I managed to skim my way through a second playthrough enough to find out that although most of the scenes will always happen and always in the same order, there is indeed some significant branching and remembered choices, though mostly not until the latter parts of the game. In particular, I think what you say about avoiding problems by being with someone else instead is partly under your control, and the final fate of the foursome (and the pop career) definitely depends on your endgame choices. I also got the impression that none of the characters were meant to be completely sympathetic (including the PC), and that Sarai in particular does some questionable things that the player is not expected to feel good about. It's interesting to think about why the knowledge of how much the choices matter affects our opinion of the game. I'm also not really sure whether the author even intends for people to play through the game multiple times. In this case I did find it rewarding and it added more insight into the story, but it was also somewhat tedious to read through so much of the same text (and I might have missed some new text because I thought I had already read it). Maybe the idea is that you'll replay it like you reread a book, not immediately but only after having put it down for a while so that you've forgotten many of the details. But not enough so that you end up making the same choices... dutchmule, November 21, 2015 - Reply Cool, thanks for letting me know about what you found by playing it twice. Yeah, that might be a style intended by the author: maybe if you don't highlight choices too much ("Sarai will remember that"), then the player will just pick whichever choice suits them best and will have the story that they want. It's a very different style from, say, Choice of Games, where the choices are big and clear and all that. Different styles, I guess, but I kinda got the "oh, something bad happened, what could have I done to avoid that" reflex, which is kinda the gamey reflex, and - hey, that's kinda the same topic as "A Figure met in a Shaded Wood". Interesting to think about :) |