Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

It's true that this game is spartan and that default responses will greet most of your actions, but as I've played some truly bad games lately, I find the whisper of a plot and the lack of dying in six turns refreshing.

Housekey, Part I features three rooms of minimal implementation. Most items can be examined (the table, the bed, the rubbish), and the plot is linear and hand-holding. If you follow the game's clues, you can get the house key and get out in less than ten turns. The ending is quite the cliffhanger, which makes you wonder why there was no part 2. Part 2 was definitely planned, so what happened?

That said, there are some oddities. First, the title. At least in American English, house key is two words. The note is (Spoiler - click to show)in some language that I didn't recognize (German? Swiss?). The score and turn counters are combined, which is initially deceptive.

Is it worth playing? There's not enough there to justify the effort, but it's not bad.

I don't care much for games conducted in limited spaces; they almost always make me feel claustrophobic. There are exceptions to the rule -- Marika the Offering, for example, was masterful; Pick up the Phone Booth and Die was humorous; and there are others, but Dog/House is not one of them.

Here, there are two rooms, and only two rooms. That's limiting enough, but the sense of claustrophobia increases with the rejection messages that meet nearly every action. You can't go anywhere except outside, and you can't do anything with the principal items in the rooms. There is a help command, but it doesn't help much.

What you're supposed to do is left unclear; it seems that the game changed quite a bit from version 1 to 2. However, Dog/House does feature some interesting items (the autumn leaves) and some sharp writing that gives you a taste of atmosphere. If the author had developed the game more, it would have been truly engrossing.

The End & etc shows that the author has progressed a bit from the See Spot Run, "Mount car" level. The setup is familiar: an alien invasion, and of course, time is not on your side. You have seven turns to figure out what to do.

The End & etc gives us an intro, motivation, a plot, and a puzzle that makes you think a second or two. I couldn't win, but I did only try a handful of times. Unfortunately, the usual problems abound: no descriptions, a typo, Scary Caps, death in under 10 turns, and read-the-author's-mind-itis. A few beta-testers would have really helped here.

I salute the author for a much better outing than his previous efforts.

After reading the intro, I really have to wonder if the author has some sort of self-hate issues going on. Why release a game that shows no evidence of purpose or plot, and has no reason for existence? Is this the only way that he can garner attention, by creating worthless games and then plaguing us all with the source code?

The writing style is vague and distinctively careless. Here's an example (and no, this is not atypical): "You are here. You can see That Car there." Behold the masterful use of Scary Caps, as if the car was supremely important. But it, like everything -- literally -- in this game, has no detail, no response to EXAMINE, no reason for existence.

Nothing is ever explained. Why do you die in six turns? Why can you not drive a car, but only mount it? What does it mean to mount a car in the first place? I can only think that the author wrote this game in five minutes, probably while taking a dump. There's certainly zero evidence of beta-testing.

You can win the game; you can lose the game. However, none of the endings have any emotional impact as they are just the default responses. So in the end, you play a game that brings no sense of achievement, no pleasure in winning, no sorrow in losing, a pointless game that exists for no reason.

In a single word, why?

If this game was actually playable, I have no doubt that it would be excellent, if the uneasy and atmospheric writing in the first two rooms was characteristic. Unfortunately, the first two rooms are all you will ever see in this game. You can never return to the chapel once you leave it. "Exit" works, but "enter" does not. No directions lead anywhere. You cannot affect the door; you cannot take the path, and there is nowhere else to go. It's not a matter of time, either, as waiting produces no results. Purple prose is everywhere, so there's nothing you can do with the world around you. I'm surprised by this, more than anything. Was Room 206 even finished?

Ordinarily I would eat up a game with dark humor and savor all the odd and eerie elisions that it gave me, but not so, here. I think the first strike is the main character; simply, she doesn't arouse any sympathy or empathy in my chest. She has several character flaws that work against her -- toilet-mouth, sexually loose, rather shallow.

The diary is strike two. If it was well-done, the game could be effective (as a tragedy), but if not, it would mark the long grey march to the end. I was looking forward to a fascinating inner life, one haunted by despair and a clutching for hope, but it came off pedestrian and flat. What the main character has experienced just doesn't seem sufficient to motivate her to commit suicide. The soaring highs, the crashing lows, the sense of oppression from which suicide seems to proffer the only hope -- these are not present. Perhaps that is a backhanded way of demonstrating the needlessness of suicide, but the lack of empathy could just as easily become another brick in the wall. "See? Even people who write games about it don't really understand it!" quoth the overwrought teen.

As for game play, there are very few bugs. The only one I found was where the narrator slipped into first person when second person had been used all along. The game distinguishes sensibly between vague options (such as "turn on water"). You can do most things that you'd expect to be able to. The only exceptions involved water, which is notoriously difficult to deal with, but if you're going to have a tub, I think that you've accepted the challenges of water. To make it purple prose is a cop-out.

The writing style is a bit rough, and it often uses hyphens in the place of semicolons or periods. A bit more polishing is in order.

Finally, the whole razon d'etre of the game is contradictory -- strike three. The help traces the evolution of the game and the author's purpose. After I read that, I thought, "Ok, I can see why he did it." However, not all endings have a postscript as described in the help. Thus, the entire stated reason of the game (to show the effects of suicide) is negated. Was that slapped on to salve the author's conscience? It's a bait-and-switch scenario.

If you're going to make a game like this, it should be better-rounded, simply due to the sensitive subject nature. As it stands, it encourages you to keep playing to see how many different endings you can discover; the different endings of course are different manners in which you attempt suicide. Suicide, despite the author's stated intentions, glorifies suicide.

There is no question about whether this is a game or not -- it's not. It's a one-question effort, with no writing, no joke, nothing but standard responses. Not even its brevity atones for its pointlessness.