Ratings and Reviews by EJ

"Choices" is a game that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. Is it a lighthearted, sexy piece following the misadventures of a teenager who really wants to get into her teacher's pants (but will take anyone else she can get along the way)? Or is it a more serious drama about said teenager's crumbling home life and said teacher's terrible secret? I really don't know. There is nothing wrong in principle with having some serious plot along with your porn (nor yet with having sex scenes in your serious drama), but in this case the different tones of the various scenes did not mesh well, resulting in an odd and disconcerting sort of mood whiplash.

One problem that this causes is with the (Spoiler - click to show)sexual abuse/blackmail storyline. Was that supposed to be portrayed as titillating (as indeed the heroine seems to find it at times), or was it supposed to be horrifying? It came off different ways in different scenes, with the result that it was hard to take fully seriously, but also made the (Spoiler - click to show)sex scenes with the teacher (and possibly her sister) at the end fairly uncomfortable. It is quite possible that the game was simply written for people who enjoy (Spoiler - click to show)fictional depictions of rape, which is not at all my kink -- so it may just be that I'm having problems with it because it isn't aimed at me. All I can say is that the handling of that storyline definitely did not work for me.

As for the heroine's troubles at home, they seem intended to offer the reader insight into who she is and why she acts as she does. It doesn't quite work, however, as it's all very trite and the characterizations of her family members never rise above the level of two-dimensional caricatures: Alcoholic Dad, Catty Mom, Delinquent Brother (with bonus Creepy Uncle in one scene). The heroine's insecurities about her sexuality, meanwhile, also suffer from the game's sexy/serious dichotomy: why is someone who doesn't want anyone to know she's gay trying to seduce any girl or woman who looks at her? It's a wonder her secret didn't get out a long time ago (although to be fair to the game, no one who finds out seems especially surprised by it).

It's not a terrible game; the choose-your-own-adventure format is fun and not something you see often, and aside from a few typos/misspellings the quality of the prose is generally good. There are a number of lines that are quite funny, often in a darkly sarcastic sort of way. It's just that all things considered, I think the game would have been better off if it had abandoned all pretenses of having a plot that deals with Important Issues and embraced its gratuitously sexy nature, or if it had put a little more effort into portraying those Important Issues with sensitivity and nuance.

What Room 206 has going for it, mostly, is its story. The small handful of puzzles are well-done enough, but they're not going to challenge most puzzle aficionados (and I have the feeling I've seen one of them, (Spoiler - click to show)the "follow the lights in the void" maze, somewhere before). The main reason to keep going through the game (and its endless "wait" commands and occasional guess-the-verb issues) is to find out what exactly is happening to its protagonist.

In a work like this, then, the writing is of utmost importance, and Room 206 doesn't do quite as well as it might in this regard. In some places, the poetic, somewhat disjointed prose works well to establish a surreal and nightmarish atmosphere; often, though, it falls into "ridiculous purple prose" territory, trainwrecks of mixed metaphors and similes leaving the reader wondering what exactly they're trying to convey. One example I found particularly egregious:

"Accompanying this gypsy theatre of scents, other sensations hang weights and baubles from the darkness. [...] In the middle of all this, thronged by the shapeless muscle like a flock of angels, wrapped in icy moonbeams, a man sits."

What is this description trying to get at? What does "thronged by the shapeless muscle like a flock of angels" even mean? Can someone really be said, even metaphorically, to be thronged by their own muscles? Unless the "muscle" part is a further metaphor describing something else altogether...

In addition to the general figurative language overload and thesaurus abuse, there were a couple of cases of words being used incorrectly, like "contemptibly" used where I'm pretty sure "contemptuously" was meant.

This prose style can interfere with the playing of the game itself; room descriptions are often walls of text, giving a lot of extraneous information and making it easy to overlook things that actually are important. I spent a lot of time trying to examine things that weren't implemented.

Flaws aside, however, the story itself is definitely intriguing, and while some aspects of the twist might be easy to guess, it's much more complicated than it may appear. The mysterious phone calls raise more questions even as they give clues to the game's larger mystery (at one point they're also used to give smoothly integrated in-game hints to a puzzle's solution, which works well). The endings leave the player with much to think about, but still feel like fitting conclusions to the narrative.

Overall, I did enjoy the game and found many of its ideas intriguing. I just feel like it could perhaps have used an editor or beta-reader to curb some of the writer's wilder flights into overblown descriptions.