Ratings and Reviews by John of Thornwick

Torn is a grindy stat-crunching slog. It's dull flavor text papered over a pile of numbers. It's "fiction" only in the sense that the website has a fictive atmosphere, but no real narrative is possible. I don't think this game offers the kind of fun most IF players are looking for.

As slice-of-life games go, this game has the potential to be a nice entry. Potential.

The idea of simulating the complex morning routine of a working parent struggling to get out the door on time is not a bad premise. The author demonstrates an appreciation of the difficulty of this lifestyle, which comes through in a few wry turns of phrase as well as in the structure of the game. That this Sarcastic Mommy flavor isn't sprinkled more liberally throughout the descriptions (especially in the refusal messages, which are mostly boilerplate), is disappointing.

There are many minor defects in the descriptive text. It is often impossible to tell what item is where (e.g., if the player has dropped something somewhere unexpected) or what state James is in (e.g., he is said to be asleep after the player wakes him).

More significantly, it is often difficult to hit on exactly the right action or sequence of actions required to accomplish something which should be quite simple mechanically. The challenge of a game like this, centered around beating the clock, should be how to organize the series of actions most efficiently, not reading the author's mind to determine what verb to use. Thus, it would do no harm to the challenge to provide cues in the descriptions and refusal messages. Granted, in a number of places this has already been done. It's unnecessarily coy for the game to be vague about what is preventing the player from putting James in the car at the end.

With some TLC and spit shine, this game could really be worth playing. But it's not there yet!

The plot of this game is obviously secondary. It's not even trying to be anything more than a pretext for the gameplay. Which would be fine, if the game were playable. The idea of combining a quiz format with RPG combat stages isn't inherently bad, but this game combines them in such a way as to make both of them less fun. The effect of the "boss fights" isn't so much to break up the monotony of the trivia game as to punish success by forcing you to repeat the questions after (almost inevitably) being defeated in a grindy link-mashing sequence.

That's the big picture. Zoom in on the details, and a different picture emerges--a much uglier picture. The battle mechanic boils down to a repeated choice between "Attack" and "Defend," a choice which has no actual discernible consequence that could lead you to develop a strategy. The fights are all unevenly matched against you, so you have you to replay each section over and over again until you get lucky.

None of that really matters though, because this is a trivia game. Just take the RPG and plot stuff as flavor or packaging, like balogna wrapped around a chocolate bar. Just gnaw your way through it to get to the good stuff, right?

Unfortunately, the trivia questions are the worst part of the game. They're the same every time you play, you're punished severely for wrong answers (you have to get every single question right), and some of the answers are flat out wrong.

All that being said, the overall structure of this game wouldn't be terrible for an educational flash-card kind of game. The questions would have to be replaced with something useful to learn, the order somewhat more randomized, and the questions in each stage would need to build logically on the previous stage. The mini-bosses could feel more like a reward than a punishment, if the player's strength in each fight depended on the number of questions correctly answered in that stage. The "attack/defend mechanic" is essentially meaningless, so it should just be thrown out. Why does there need to be any clicking at all? Just let the fights play out automatically on a timer.