Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

This game has a very fun premise and voice; unfortunately, though, I had to guess-the-verb my way through it, at one point resorting to asking someone else who’d played for a hint because I was completely stumped (and the in-game hints didn’t have anything for that particular situation). After that I made some progress on my own, but ultimately turned to the in-game hints quite a bit. In retrospect, I could see how the things I got stuck on were clued, so I think this was a case of me just not being as clever as the game required! There were a few small implementation errors that I found, but overall it's a well-done game with excellent writing, fun puzzles utilizing unique, world-appropriate objects, and a great comedic character in Captain Booby. Maybe just a liiiittle more cluing for those of us who might otherwise (Spoiler - click to show)(fail to) struggle.

This was another game that had me quite confused at first—I couldn't for the life of me understand what I was supposed to be doing (Spoiler - click to show)if I couldn't use verbs! After some flailing I turned to the in-game hints, which fortunately clearly explained what was going on. From that point on it became a fun and unique little exercise. It's got an unusual parser game mechanic, and I'm impressed by the coding it must have taken to make it all work. The story was cute too; I liked the reveal and that there were multiple possible endings.

A downside is that it was very short—by the time I felt like I’d gotten the hang of the mechanic and was gearing up to do more complex things with it, the game was over! So it felt a bit more like a proof of concept than a full game, but if the author ever did make a longer game with this conceit, I would be first in line to play.

I found this game disorienting at first, to the point that I almost stopped playing. I was confused about both the situation and the location (and still am about the latter to some degree, even after re-reading---I'm not sure where the chapel, school, and volleyball courts all are in relation to each other... or why there's a stage outside?). So initially I was more frustrated than intrigued---but when I read on I discovered that there's a good reason for the disorientation, and suddenly it became quite compelling.

Unfortunately, the story didn't live up to its promise for me; I never got enough of a sense of the wider world to understand the stakes for the NPCs, and they weren't developed enough for me to be invested in their fates. I didn't understand why (Spoiler - click to show)they became fixated on the PC after discovering the journals; there was an escalation there that I couldn't see a reason for. I also never felt much for/about the PC. (Spoiler - click to show)Her circumstances reminded me of the film *Memento*, but what makes that movie so good IMO is that the protagonist has a goal that he's deeply passionate about. Here, the PC has no goal beyond maintaining her status quo---and she is able to achieve that very easily.

I also had some quibbles about the writing; the dialogue was stilted at times, and the tense randomly switched between past and present. Finally, it would be nice if there was a "restart" button at the end; as-is, in order to replay you have to close and re-open the game.

I do feel like there's something interesting to be said about gender in the game---the PC is a woman, (Spoiler - click to show)as was her former lover, and the sole female NPC in the story has a different fate than the two male ones. I'll have to stew on that aspect some more...