Reviews by EJ

The eponymous protagonist of WATT wakes up on an island, his memories somewhat fuzzy, and is told he has to collect six keys to get into a lighthouse to perform a task that will save everyone. This could be a setup for a classic puzzle game, but WATT is instead a slow, meditative, lightly interactive experience (I’m not sure there’s more than one meaningful choice) that muses on life, priorities, grief, and regret. Its dreamy vagueness was sometimes hard for me to connect with emotionally, but that could be my problem more than the game’s. It still had moments I found evocative and moments I found amusing. I especially liked the Chinese opera segment, which explores a man trying to find a balance between caring for his family and meeting societal expectations of masculinity in a way that’s metaphorical but also specific and unusual.

I did, however, find the work a little unwieldy to interact with. WATT tells you that to move forward, you should click on the colored text if there is any, and if there isn’t you should just click anywhere. This is fine; the problem is that sometimes it isn’t quite true. First, the game also makes heavy use of text styling, sometimes including color, for effect, which means sometimes it’s unclear which colored text is actually clickable and which isn’t. Second, sometimes the links did not seem to be colored—given that when they were visibly colored they were usually blue, it’s possible that the ones that seemed black were actually a very dark blue that my blue light filter was sucking the color out of, but they didn’t look different from the surrounding text to me. In addition, text effects (including colors) did sometimes get in the way of readability, and there was some timed text, particularly towards the end, that I found frustrating.

The visual design is otherwise very nice—including the use of text effects when they don't affect readability too badly—and the original artwork done for the game is excellent. I just wish I'd been able to spend more time thinking about what the game was trying to say and less time thinking about where I was supposed to click or trying to make out low-contrast text.

Errand Run is a short Twine work, nominally about going to the grocery store, but all is not what it seems. It has a few choices that I feel work well to keep the player engaged, (Spoiler - click to show)although there’s no real branching.

The writing sketches out an intriguing portrait of the PC in a short amount of time and doles out “wait, what?” details with carefully calculated escalation. By the time the player reaches the ending, the broad strokes of the situation are unlikely to be a surprise, but there’s still a lot that’s unexpected in the way those lines are filled in, with some striking, well-chosen imagery. The Twine styling is Harlowe default, but the use of text effects and colors was effective and I never found it unpleasant to read or distracting.

It won’t be to everybody’s tastes, of course, but it’s a short enough piece that I think it’s worth checking out. I found it well-crafted and look forward to trying this author’s other entries.

The Burger Meme Personality Test is a satirical short game that mocks the personality tests that some companies use as part of their hiring process.

Certainly there is a rich vein of absurdity to be mined here. The last test of this nature that I took consisted of placing yourself along a continuum between two statements, except that the statements weren’t really in opposition—think “I like to make friends” vs. “I like to experience new things.” How do you answer if it’s neither, or both? What answer are they even looking for when both options seem like things you would broadly want? I probably thought a little too hard about the implications of it all. I didn’t get an interview. And that’s on the tame side for this type of thing.

Burger Meme definitely gets some good hits in. I like the unexplained “sins” counter at the bottom, and the part where it makes you rate the relevance of the test and then reveals that it’s taking those answers into account for hiring. (I do always wonder if they’re doing that.) The game also makes good use of multimedia, is highly polished, and is short enough not to overstay its welcome. On balance I definitely think it’s worth your time to play through at least once. (I played twice and got two different endings, neither of which involved getting the job.)

But the “good ending” you get for refusing to completely abase yourself feels a little hollow, to me. Like, sure, I’m too good for that evil company, good for me! I still need a job, though, don’t I? Do I even have any non-evil options? (I’m projecting a little, of course, but at the same time, the game seems to invite that.) “How much am I willing to suck up to the corporate overlords in order to pay my bills?” is in real life a complicated question, and in providing karmic rewards of a sort to anyone who decides the answer is “not that much”, the game makes it seem much simpler.

But hey—in the unforgiving landscape of the current job market, maybe a little bit of (occasionally schadenfreude-flavored) wish fulfillment is perfectly reasonable.

(That said, if you question the AI nature of the supposed chatbot administering the test, there is another suite of endings that are a little less expected—but I haven't had the chance to explore them very fully yet.)