Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

DOL-OS is less a choice-based game and more a hypertext exploration game—or more specifically, a “found document” game, with the documents consisting of computer programs, web browser history, images, music, text files, log entries, etc. Being given this trove to explore was compelling, even as at first I was very confused about what all the things I was reading/seeing had to do with each other.

The lovely UI does a lot to create immersion—it’s a great faux computer interface, complete with a green CRT emulation, a variety of icons, and different looks for different programs. The pacing is handled well, with puzzles gating the content you’re meant to see later, meaning the tension slowly escalates as you learn more specifics about who this computer belonged to and what they were working on. There’s one point at which it’s clear you’re getting to the meat of the game, and pieces of what you’ve seen earlier start connecting, until finally you have the full story—and the full horror of it. And there’s still one more twist after that…

(Spoiler - click to show)The moment where you realize that the AI is still present, and you can interact with it, was a great one—perfectly chilling after all you now know. The conversation with it was a little bit of a let down to me, though. Here you get a list of questions you can ask, which you can lawnmower through---picking one doesn't lock you out of any others. However, some of those options lead to sub-menus of questions, and typically you can only ask one of those before you’re shunted back to the main menu. I didn’t see any in-game reason for this, and would have liked to be able to ask all the sub-questions. There’s also, as wolfbiter's review points out, the fact that you don’t get to pick every piece of dialogue from the PC—some back-and-forth happens without your input, which was a little jarring because up until that point, there hadn't really *been* a PC, just me, the player. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when given the choice at the end, I didn’t see any reason why I’d want to save the program—the game certainly gave me no evidence it was at all a good thing!

I liked that most of the links are keybound—i.e., there’s a little number next to each, showing that you can press that number on the keyboard to open that link. But there were a few hiccups with this system; not every clickable option on each screen is keybound, on one screen there’s a “10” option instead of a 0, and some parts of the game simply can’t be played via the keyboard. I also discovered only after completing the game that there are in-game hints accessible only from the keybinding menu—not sure if I missed something at the beginning indicating they were there? Finally, I don’t want to be a dick about translated games, but the text could use a final proofreading pass to clean up typos and errant phrasing.

Despite my quibbles, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game; it was fun to progress, solving the small puzzles to unlock more text and finally learn the answer to the mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)And a game about the perils of trusting in AI too much feels very timely…

While I didn’t call this out in my review of the prior entry, it’s true of all three games: the cast list provided at the beginning is a great introduction to the characters, introducing the two or three people who appear in each game with two positive and two negative adjectives, giving you a sense of who they are without giving away any of the games’ secrets. Like the others, this one also has a nice UI, again with a great use of color and starting out with a well-done emulation of a messaging app.

In contrast to the slow build of the prior installment, in this one you’re given the details of the situation—and the possible danger you’re in—right away, immediately establishing tension. Other notable contrasts are that you have much more agency (or at least, there’s the illusion that you do), but instead of choosing actions to do/try, you’re picking nouns to engage with. The game has a mini world model and is focused on exploring your environment, and there’s even a small puzzle (although you can finish the game without solving it). This entry clearly belongs with the two previous games while still having its own distinct type of gameplay. As I said about #2, the range of options the player has in such a short game is impressive(Spoiler - click to show)—while, as in the prior installment, it always ends the same way, there are variations to the ending (I found three) depending on what you do or don’t do during your playthrough.

While technically this is a review of the third game, the rest of this is thoughts on the cycle (as it stands now) as a whole. As such, it has major spoilers!

(Spoiler - click to show)You may have noted that I didn’t review the first game; it wasn’t as striking to me as these two, mainly because it feels like necessary setup before things really get going in #2. As I said in my review of that one, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters. Each has a different PC; the one in the first game is the current wife in a Bluebeard scenario who kills her murderous husband and escapes. However, in the second game this same woman is the villain—she murders that game’s PC, and has been doing the same to any man who gets too close to her daughter. “Men are horrors, every one,” she says in seeming justification.

When playing this entry for the first time, this statement reads as a misguided belief based on her traumatic experience with her husband, with the PC an innocent victim who we have no reason to believe deserved this. But in the third game, we’re taken back in time and shown that he’s actually a serial killer—he’s the villain now, with a new PC as his hapless victim. Just as this man is reframed, so is the woman from #1 and #2 yet again—maybe she was entirely justified in taking out her daughter’s fiance! Of course it’s much less black-and-white than that, but I loved how I was made to rethink her character twice over the course of the cycle.

It’s an excellent linked series of games. All three feature a PC trying to get out of a dangerous situation alive, and all have only a single possible outcome—someone always dies. In the first one—the only one with a woman PC—you succeed, but in the second two, you don’t. Two of the games have a serial killer meeting his end, both killed by the same woman. In the first one, a man threatens a woman’s life, but ultimately she kills him. The third one has a presumably queer man killing another queer man. The trilogy is playing with the idea of victim and perpetrator—anyone can be either, or both—and showing how context-dependent our judgments of who deserves to live or die are.

I know there are a few more games to come in the cycle, and I’m curious what they’ll do to change my view of these three and their characters. Will we see more of the PC from #3, or the daughter from #2? She feels like a foil to the Bluebeard character from the first game; him clearly evil, a perpetrator only, her clearly innocent, solely a victim. But will we learn things that call her innocence or that of #3’s PC into question? I certainly look forward to finding out.

This is the second of three games (so far) in Charm’s RGB Cycle, all of which were made for this year’s Neo-Twiny Jam, which had a length restriction of 500 words (not counting code). I definitely recommend starting with the first entry, not because this one can’t stand alone, but because playing it within the context of the first adds a layer to the experience. In this trilogy, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters.

But on to the actual game! It’s very stylish, with a nicely presented introduction screen (containing instructions for playing and a cast list) and making good use of color throughout, presenting each character's dialogue in a different color in order to distinguish them. The opening lines set a sinister mood that ramps up as you realize what exactly the PC’s current situation is—I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say that you spend the game trapped in a dark room. Reminiscent of Abigail Corfman’s A Dream of Silence, you have a range of available actions—looking, speaking, and moving—which result in more information and/or different outcomes as you repeat them.

The pacing is excellent, with conversations overheard from outside your prison conveying the passage of time and adding to the suspense. The game uses its small word count very effectively, and because of the several options always available to you and the different ways they build on each other, you likely won’t see all the text on a single playthrough(Spoiler - click to show)—and while the game always ends the same way, there are at least two variations on the ending. After my first playthrough I replayed it immediately to see what I'd missed.

I won't say much more due to the risk of spoilers, but it's a great little horror game. The two moments of peak horror for me: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a point where your choices are “Crawl”, “Scream”, or “Bleed”, and damn, that reveal at the end.

I encountered one small bug (a line of text appearing at one point suggesting I do something that I'd already done), but I only happened upon it after multiple playthroughs, so it certainly didn't impede my enjoyment!