Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

A strikingly surreal piece, with the feel of a (feminist?) short story written in the 1960s or 70s, or certainly in a time when people took Freud way too seriously. Unfortunately, version 1 is crippled by some major bugs.

The game has two PCs; one, Paul, obsesses over Lisa and in doing so distorts her reality. While the content is technically PG, Paul's obsession is in a pretty fetishy idiom, and the story as a whole is one of those works (see also Portal, maybe make some change, Loved) that plays heavily on creepy compulsion and manipulation of the player. For the most part, you have very limited options and the game makes it extremely clear what they are. There is one rather odd puzzle, which is less complicated than it looks (which means that it can be solved without being fully understood.)

As of version 1, there's an annoyingly repeating run-time bug (attempt to look up a non-existent correspondence in Table 1) in the second scene, although I can't tell if it breaks anything critical. More seriously, I was unable to finish She's Actual Size due to a major bug later on that failed to switch between protagonists at the appropriate moment. This is a shame, because it's a fascinatingly weird beast.

A bite-sized wordplay piece that should take under five minutes to play. Fictional content is slight, surreal and entirely in service to the wordplay.

Most puzzles have a trick to them, a satisfying moment in which you discover how the thing works and can start to make progress. A really good puzzle still requires some ingenuity after you've worked out the trick. In a bad puzzle, all that's left after discovering the trick is brute-forcing or other kinds of tedious slog. By that standard, this isn't really good, nor is it bad; it swiftly delivers that single gleeful moment, and after that everything else is trivial.