Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

Playing time: ~5 minutes

Styled as a spoof fantasy adventure, complete with wise old sage, you play a hero venturing in search of the titular Sacred Staff of Deck Koji. True to the spirit of the thing, the obstacles you face are silly. The writing is competent and the game isn’t buggy, but it was a rather unmemorable game - it felt more like a test game - but the ‘Making Of’ section included in the game is worth reading.

I just have one quibble, though given the size of this game, it may be a trivial one - many decision points have choices which result in dead ends. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why this should be, which made it, in the authors’ words, ‘mildly irritating’. ...Was this intentional?

So, is it fun? Er. Hardly. I had more fun reading the ‘Making Of’ than playing the game, so… your mileage may vary, I guess. Two stars for functionality: it works, and I didn't spot any bugs or typos.

Note: this review is for the Undum/Vorple version. It does not appear to work on Google Chrome (44.0.2403) or Safari (8.0.8).

You were born on the Magellan, kilometres and kilometres away from Earth. You were born and raised in space, and the ship Magellan has been the only home you've ever known.

You want to get home.

Starborn is a melancholic exploration game. Originally a Z-machine game, it has since been adapted for Undum/Vorple, which is a natural fit for this format. The writing is clean, though unremarkable; the most memorable feature about this game would probably be the close attention paid to the playing experience. Keywords are both hyperlinked and given a special column. Navigation can be done either through the hyperlinked keywords or through the panel on the left.

In terms of story, the author gives hints as to what's going on, but the writing has some emotional depth: a sense of alienation (ahem) and loneliness pervades the descriptions of Earth, and of yourself.

You are a serial killer, with his (his? It’s not entirely clear) next ‘guest’.

The Urge is by turns gory and mundane, but largely linear. It is more a character study than an interactive story. It takes us through what the author imagines to be the everyday life of a serial killer, (Spoiler - click to show)juxtaposing the PC’s uncontrollable bloodlust with mundane activities like cleaning up and going grocery shopping.

What graphics included in the game are well-rendered and attractive, but the formatting of the text had several slips, including missing punctuation marks and inconsistent line breaks.

The story could also have taken some interesting turns - letting the reader decide the PC’s motivation, for example, or the extent to which the PC will go. Instead, the linear storyline reads like lots of other serial-killer TV serials, with little nuance or, indeed, anything to invest the reader in the PC. Maybe this was a reflection of the unstoppable nature of the titular urge to kill. Maybe it was unintentional. But it felt like clicking through a story, and not a very engaging one, at that.

Overall, I felt the graphics looked good and were used thoughtfully, but the story was rather lacking, which is a pity!

This game is a li’l bit similar to Snack Time, wherein you view a typical human environment through an animal’s eyes. This kind of game works when there is charm and puzzles/actions which hinge on understanding the perspective and making use of it.

One big problem is that ‘look’ doesn’t produce a description of the room you’re in. In an exploration game, this is a very strange omission. Also, for an exploration game, a lot of things aren’t really implemented. (Spoiler - click to show)I don’t understand how examining a object lets you know its name.

The limits of your understanding also seem arbitrary: you don’t know what walls and doors are, calling them ‘ows’ and ‘mows’, yet you know what (Spoiler - click to show)‘metal’ is, even ‘bathroom’, even though a moment ago you were calling it a dark room smelling of water.

The inconsistencies make immersion into the game difficult. Even if the premise is very cute, I found it hard to get into the flow of the thing, because a lot of objects were described in rather generic, sterile ways... unlike a kitten.

You're a girl on her first day of high school, but you've got a problem greater than friends or horrible teachers on your hands: your reflection in the mirror is threatening mutiny.

The first thing that strikes me is that it's a very aesthetically pleasing game. Visual elements are used to great effect. The evil mirror-self is shown in the reflected text which changes, not very subtly, to insert negative thoughts about a situation; the text changes when you click through links to reflect what is presumably the PC's insecurity and anxiety about her new situation. There’s a whole lot of clicking through, though, not all of which I thought was strictly necessary.

The content - family life, high-school social minefields - is very much the stuff of many teen fiction novels, and what should have made it impactful would be the presentation of the evil mirror-self, but the goal of the game was probably nothing overtly spooky. Rather, it was more about the internal emotional conflict of the PC.

So far I've found two endings, (Spoiler - click to show)the triumphant and doppelganger one. I found the confrontation well-written and personally it struck a chord with me, though there was little to build up to this. The endgame could have been much stronger if the PC had been less generic. If we understood a bit more about her fears and personality, then it might have made the triumph feel more like one. That said, I enjoyed the sly ending (though really nothing surprising to one who reads horror fiction so often).