Ratings and Reviews by Audiart

Truth is definitely a joke game, but unlike most, it is well implemented and bug-free, as well as being much more clever. The premise and the puzzles are simple: expose the lies surrounding you. The scenario is realistic and thus provides a humorous commentary on the everyday lies we endure in the man-made world.

The real puzzle of Truth is finding ALL of the lies, not any single lie. For the most part they are found in the places you would expect: advertising, politics, the Internet. But some are subtle and require a lot of attention to detail. As the world is rather small, this can be a little tedious, and I am ashamed to admit that after extensive puzzling I could only uncover 19 of the 21 lies, and thus was driven mad.

I recommend this game as a short and well-written diversion that will definitely put a satirical smile on your face and even occasionally make you laugh out loud.

Although I did not enjoy playing Fail-Safe, I had to give it a good rating for its very effective and innovative narrative voice. Jon Ingold is really a master of this and it shines brightly in this early game. In fact I think the brevity of the game really accentuated the tantalizing and creepy atmospheric effect of the narrative.

It would be a shame to elaborate further on the nature of this narrative voice, for it would ruin the experience of playing the game, and as the puzzles and plot are fairly unmentionable, this would seriously detract from the merits of the game.

However: Fail-Safe, by so exquisitely rendering its eerie atmosphere, produces a distinctly uncomfortable feeling; there is blood, you are trapped, it is an emergency. I would not recommend this game to anyone who is not fond of such scenarios, because the game is, from its first line to its last, so instantly and totally immersive.

In this way, its greatest strength can be its own shortcoming (for some players) -- the narrative method is so effective that I sincerely disliked the feeling of being immersed in the world of Fail-Safe, as it felt so very real and urgent and disturbing.

Based on reviews I really wanted to like this game, and gave it a fair try. But it was just one text-dump after another from the beginning. I thought this would abate after the introduction, but it didn't. It was such a chore to try to plow through this rather dry writing that I felt totally unmotivated to explore or solve the puzzles. I was also instantly repelled by the different text colors, and I had no attachment to the characters.

As a fan of golden age science fiction, animal oriented games, humorous games, and metaphysics, I came into Rover's Day Out hoping for a lot. Unfortunately, all I got an uninteresting amateur novel that I had to tap my way through with canned responses.