Ratings and Reviews by Joey Jones

Smoothly implemented closed house crime story. You assemble all the clues, then work out the alibis. The artificiality of the setup is made up for by the neatness of the solution and pleasingly bizarre but self consistent plot. The format lends itself to serialisation.

The in-game chalkboard system is good at collating all the clues for you, but a having a paper and pen handy is recommended for putting it all together.

In the game you proceed through a series of rooms, gaining new verbs as you go. It works as a metaphor for someone gaining confidence after a controlling relationship.

The puzzles themselves are quite arbitrary, somewhat alleviated by the in-built walkthrough. The game also falls into the common trap of having a lot of similarly named objects to disambiguate between. All in all, it's an interesting idea let down a little by the implementation.

First off: this game is hilarious and engrossing even if you're not among its intended teenage audience. Unlike other interaction fiction formats that excel at simulating places or actions, the chat medium is excellent at simulating friendships with all the back-and-forth free flowing camaraderie and gossip.

There were a bunch of genuine laugh out loud moments: (Spoiler - click to show)the running weasel gag was great and I almost fell off my chair at the option to say 'YOLO, bloodsucker' to my soon-to-be-vampire friend. It was a perfectly pitched moment.

The medium of chat messages is a challenging sphere to write for: in a story comprised of dialogue all descriptions have to be naturalistic, all exposition has to fit into what a person would report. Felicity makes excellent use of images to show people and places that the characters wouldn't describe in words.

The setting sports an intriguing (and sometimes slightly twisted) reimagining of werewolves, sorcerers and vampires. The supernatural world is learned about through steady immersion and by the 3rd day more and more of its secrets click into place.