Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

You're on a dinner date with Caroline. She's mysterious, and just before you leave her for the night, she tells you to meet her at Hydra Park the next day.

Caroline has the looks of a Twine game but uses a streamlined parser. Despite this, though, the range of actions available to the PC was extremely limited - meaning instead of clicking links as in Twine, one has to type out the keywords… word for word.

The minimal presentation of the text, while pretty, made the game feel claustrophobic. Perhaps it was meant to heighten the uneasy atmosphere of later chapters. Perhaps it was to highlight the impact of the words, the terse questions. If it was, then this worked for me.

The lack of choices in what would ordinarily be extremely open-ended situations (sitting in a room with a stranger, for example) felt contrived sometimes. This made it hard for me to suspend disbelief, though this was at least somewhat addressed in the final chapter.

I had a little beef with this curious fact: in Caroline, no one has much of a background story and everyone is generic! The PC is just… a man. Caroline… is a woman. This all added to the claustrophobic feel of the game. In the end, Caroline scores neither on the quality of story, nor on use of game mechanics.

Ooh-er. This game could probably do with a whole lot of beta-testing.

The writing has a few too many punctuation errors and awkward sentences and capitalisation. Many objects were also implemented with very bare descriptions. It gives the impression of hasty writing and sloppy editing.

Gameplay was somewhat hindered by what are is either a coding problem or a lack of subtlety:
• The laundry list-style listing of room descriptions is quite disconcerting. Logically, one would not list potentially important NPCs (e.g. Watson) along with the debris in the room.

• it is nigh impossible to zoom in into details on individual objects (Spoiler - click to show)-- the scratch markings on the table, for example. Given that this is a mystery, and set in a Sherlock Holmes-esque setting, this makes no sense.

One hopes that in future revisions, the author scrutinizes his writing carefully and plays it through a few times himself. Even cosmetic things like introductory text at the start of the game wouldn't hurt- instead of just dropping the player in with the dead body.