Reviews by AmberShards
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Uniquely Atmospheric, May 29, 2011Wetlands is one of the rare games that sticks in your mind after you step away from the computer; the mysterious symbology, the unique atmosphere, the timeless feel -- all of these work together to evince a vivid, wistful, everlasting poignancy also created by the Zork series, The Moonlit Tower, Myst, and very few other games. The writing is simply fantastic (with the exception of an unnecessary profanity). The atmosphere rotates around water and wood -- ponds, beaches, forests, driftwood, dried leaves, rusty pipes, and so forth. The language is evocative but not to Romantic excess; it is quietly balanced and enduring.
The basic plot is that you are seeking the Crystal City -- a perhaps-legendary water-city, possibly magical, possibly quite advanced. You have narrowed its location down to the Waterworks, an water processing facility consisting of a pond, a few buildings, and the surrounding woods. Of course, you will not leave until you have discovered the city.
In contrast to the plot and the atmosphere, the puzzles are for the most part im-poss-ible. They are not clued whatsoever, and the game provides no direction as to what you're supposed to do next. Yes, you could argue that echoes Zork, and while the lack of cluing leads you to explore more, you are hampered by Wetlands' linear plot. Lack of cluing plus a linear plot yields frustration, whereas in more exploration-type games, it does not. I'm also not too impressed by the NPCs. They are well-characterized, but completely unhelpful, and there are no built-in hints.
I didn't make it very far -- only to the status "starting to trickle" -- but I don't think I will be able to proceed any further than that. Given that the game has a few other minor errors, proceeding might not be possible. It probably is, but I don't know for sure. If for no other reason, play this for the atmosphere.
Revealing, but Neither Game Nor Story, May 29, 2011To be sure, Gigantomania is realistic. You can feel it in your pores like sodden air. It also authentically Russian, with realistic detail, and all manners of dark humor and deception. However, as a game, Gigantomania falls short.
The plot slowly unfurls the corrupt nature of communism in every strata of society across separate scenes, linked together only via the main characters as types of workers that embody that failed totalitarian system. Although that abstract (instead of personal) linkage may well radiate the cold cruelty of Stalin's Russia, it does not build a strong plot. It also dries up the wells of sympathy which are engaged when you know more of the character by being in his or her skin for an appreciable length of time.
The puzzles themselves are fairly easy except for the ending puzzle in the third scene, which I could not solve; that there is a fourth scene suggests that this is possible, although it would be far more realistic if there were there no solution -- making every ending a win, or perhaps a loss.
Grammar problems occasionally crop up in Gigantomania, but there are no coding errors that I discovered. In the first scene, depending on what you do, you will find a character that delivers a horribly profane monologue. While I understand his desperation, it says little for the authors' creativity that they chose to reveal it in this way. I could easily conceive of his words delivered through clenched teeth as being more forceful without such.
In the end, I'm not sure how well Gigantomania works as a game; it is like several mini-games in one, connected abstractly to one another. The subject matter is a very much overlooked era of history, but this and the oppressive atmosphere still don't compensate for the lack of unity and the lack of plot. So, my hat's off for the authors sticking a thumb in the eye of those who whitewash history, but I hope that they pay more attention to game aspects in future releases.
Serviceable, May 29, 2011For what it is, Escape in the Dark is fine -- a low-key, almost spartan, escape-the-room type game, done with style and a hint of atmosphere. The puzzles are challenging, but not brain straining, and they all make sense. I felt the atmosphere was a bit lacking, and the ending was just kinda there -- it didn't seem the adequately reward the player for making it through.
It's short and it's better than most escape-the-room setups; serviceable is what I'd say, and that's neither a slam nor praise.
Zombies, At Your Service, May 29, 2011Divis Mortis is in a word, split-personality. The first few moves reveal a stomach-wrenching experience and with that out in the open, you think you know what kind of ride you're in for. But you're wrong, because then the silly one-liners show up. Danielle is right. These attenuate the horror instead of amping it up. Lynnea, if you're listening, we can handle it. True horror fans don't need lighter elements. Give us the soul-soaking dread and doom of pure zombie madness. Ahem.
Yes, this game is a zombie survival game, but more fair and playable than some others of the genre (Resident Evil series, I'm looking at you). It's a richly-detailed world, and the author knows her medical terminology. The descriptions are succinct, sometimes cold, but always sufficient. The puzzles range from fairly simple to medium difficulty, with the exception of one which requires the hints.
Anyways, Divis Mortis (cool name BTW) has some other problems. These are mostly grammatical, but occasionally, are more serious. For instance, you can escape one particular zombie simply by running past him, even though your character is rooted to the spot in dread. That zombie then disappears. He's nowhere to be found. Another rather serious issue involves the order in which you do certain things. (Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that you need to retrieve an item from your car; however, if you barricade the doors to the outside first, you can never get back out to get to your car. Yet another issue involves (Spoiler - click to show)what happens to the lamp once you drop it into the basement. The basement has light, but the lamp and the rope disappear.. More troubling still are some of the logical leaps that the game makes, as if the plot were not throughly worked out.
It looks like there are multiple endings; I finished the game with a score of 88 out of 100, but I'm uncertain what else I could have done. The ending that I did achieve was again, split-personality. It proved to be initially interesting (why did the former victim behave the way he did?) but panned out to be cheesy and unsatisfying. The PC flavor and the humor closed the game with a wink and a nod, not a roundhouse to the solar plexus.
Divis Mortis is not a suffocating overcoat of gothic dread, despite the name; it is a partly serious survival zombie game. All horror fans should give it a whirl, but the hardcore aficionados will most likely be disappointed by its nonserious bent.
Interactive Mystery Meat, May 28, 2011I've played this game -- or attempted to play it -- twice, and the last time around I was up to 160 turns without a single point. Usually if I reach 100 turns with no points (assuming there are points), that's my signal to quit in frustration. I stuck around for a few more turns to see if I had missed something. Consulting the walkthrough shows that indeed, I had missed something. It turns out that in the fourth scene, everything hinges upon one completely non-obvious command. If you intuit it, then apparently the rest of the game opens up into wherever it goes; if you don't, then you're left to scratch your head.
Now with that out of the way, I think you'll probably be scratching your head the majority of this game. It's not that the character's weird outlook prevents you from discovering things; it's not even that what he experiences makes no sense; it's that the game is not well clued or well paced.
Episode... is split into scenes, which are roughly equivalent to chapters, as this is more of a story than a game. That aside, it seems silly to have a score, but nevertheless, there's a score. You can make it to the fourth scene with zero points by doing what you expect the story wants of you. Shouldn't there have been some points along to way to tell you, "Yes, you're doing things right"? I think only the dedicated or the bored will keep trundling on when there's no rewards in sight, be it score or otherwise. The lack of reward lies in the nature of the game, as well. You can progress from scene to scene without any idea that you've done anything great or ill; so there's this sense of being disconnected from what you're doing. Perhaps that is purposeful, given the character's disconnected outlook from his own life.
Anyhow, I can't say that this game really hit me one way or the other. It seemed to just settle into me with a leaden emptiness, like some generic early grunge song. The main character is a mindless happy sort; the world around him is by turns bizarre and mundane; nothing you do or say seems to matter much. I guess it's not horrible, but mystery meat rarely reaches the heights of culinary praise, and Episode...is probably best described as mystery meat.
Fairly Interesting, May 28, 2011For a game coded in three hours and revised once, the Forest House holds up darn well. There are still problems, grammar and otherwise, but the game can be won, although winning herein is an uncertain victory at best.
The game is told through the eyes of a 12-year old child, with humorous insights and believable language. The setting is faintly atmospheric, although the author could have really gone for broke and I wouldn't have minded. The concept of a house that only you can see, which has intrigued you for a long time, and which begs you to sneak out in the middle of the night -- that simply screams for immersive language. However, authorial restraint doesn't cripple the game; it just makes it emotionally uniform, except for the very end.
The puzzles herein are refreshingly easy, although some of them are not terribly well clued. They all make sense and you can go back to get objects that you need should you forget them. In all of this, the ADRIFT parser doesn't get in your way, which was refreshing.
The Forest House doesn't take much time, so if you're in the mood for something faintly interesting with a touch of atmosphere, it's a decent play.
An Episode of Buffy (Not a Compliment), May 26, 2011Sadly, Wes Garden's Halting Nightmare demonstrates the low quality that ADRIFT games are known for. I didn't start out thinking that; I was convinced of that as the game progressed.
To be sure, it starts out interestingly enough, but half-way through the introduction, at the juncture between grandeur and mundanity, WGHN takes the tried and true path into the lands of everyday horror. The main character is a stock and unreal cypher (really, a teenaged male is not affected by a stunningly attractive female doctor?), and then the game requires the use of adverbs to play. Uggghhhhh. Examine isn't enough; no, you must CLOSELY EXAMINE. Then the grammar goes south and you become aware of the overuse and misuse of ellipses. It feels like the game is self-destructing before your very eyes.
Next, the plot takes a pagan turn and your task suddenly becomes a mission to reunite Grecian deities (apparently they don't have the power to find one another, despite being gods). Right around here, you become aware of the plot-on-rails nature of the game.
The game trudges on, introducing you to a nearly pornographic candy striper named Hope -- with stereotypical Southern charms. (Yes, Southern women are hawt, but can't you be a little bit more creative in communicating their appeal?). To move the plot forward, you get to play "guess the question".
Then, everything hits the fan. It turns out that the only way to play this game is to play it under Windows, because the SCARE clones don't implement combat and guess what this game has? Yup, combat. Even using Wine won't help -- at least it didn't help me.
From what I could see, WGHN ended up feeling like a Buffy episode. In fact, that's probably the best way to describe the game; as Buffy was goth light with stereotyped characters, that's what WGHN is.
Infamous, May 26, 2011Amissville II is simply disastrous. The coding skills here are awful, and the mangled English middle-school level at best. Those are harsh words, I admit, so let's provide evidence for them.
As far as coding goes, there are knapsacks which you can't open (but which magically open once you pick them up), a radio that you start off holding but you can't use, and characters that talk to you, but whom you can't talk to. Who you are is never revealed, because examining yourself returns no useful information whatsoever. Examining the newspaper reveals a graphic of a newspaper that the author didn't even finish creating. You get the idea.
The text omits apostrophes, features weird spacing, uses a strange character for the letter "Y", forgets verbs, misspells words, omits periods, and graces the screen with run-on sentences. Note: these are not occasional issues. They occur in every single room. Of course, there's profanity as well.
The feel is some drugged mix of environmentalism, down home humor, and general geekiness, strung together with attempts at Romanticism that result in an extremely amateurish pastiche. The fact that the game is massive doesn't really help, although that might appeal to players who like exploring. Don't get me wrong; Amissville II has a distinctive feel. The author succeeded there. However, distinction without quality is infamy, and Amissville II is infamous.
You can detect a certain enthusiastic earnestness in this game, like that of the late Paul Panks. I don't want to trod unnecessarily upon the author, but the craft of the game was almost nonexistent. Amissville II has the look and feel of a game that was coded in a week, start-to-finish, if not in a shorter period of time. I played it hoping that it was some marginal improvement over what I'd read of Amissville, but if this is an improvement, then I shudder. That's what evinces my stinging words -- the fact that the author just didn't care.
Familiar Ground, May 26, 2011If you've been running low on anti-American paganistic stories, Sons of the Cherry will recharge your battery. Of course, SOTC features the expected "people born more than 100 years ago are irrational and stupid" sub-theme as well as potshots at Christianity. At least the author knows his audience. I'm a bit mystified as to why he felt it necessary to disguise this in a generic CYOA RPG outfit, though. Those clothes are especially deceptive because they make it seem like you have choices, when in reality, your choices are all illusions.
The plot is on rails -- no matter what you choose, you end up at the same place. Maybe you can die, but I tried a few things and nothing resulted in my death. SOTC is much more of a story than a game, but you still have to select some meaningless choice, and click a button for the plot to proceed. I'm no fan of non-interactive fiction, and SOTC is non-interactive fiction.
The prose style is fairly atmospheric, competent (errors are few), and concise. The game is unscored, and I didn't notice anything that affected your statistics, though you'd think that it would. Maybe you have to finish the game or go much further than I did. I quit early on, after learning that my character was a warlock of some sort.
If you enjoy non-interactive fiction disguised, pro-witchcraft themes with a dose of anti-Americanism, you'll like SOTC.
Experience Without Wisdom, May 22, 2011On the quality of the writing alone, East Grove Hills ranks as stellar. The characters are well-defined, believable, true-to-life, and pitiable, even though the main character (narrator) can be hurtfully sarcastic. The feel is high-school angst captured to a T, without being preachy, ridiculous, or done to excess. You can feel it soaking into your pores, if you've forgotten what it's like, or radiating out of them when the words find their brothers beneath your skin.
However, it's not a game. It's not even a CYOA. The plot has an inescapable chokehold upon the player, and all you can do is go from one scene to the next, as expected. Despite that this is hinted to be part of the narrator's character, it doesn't help alleviate the claustrophobia it induces in the player.
There are some technical problems, too, especially when conversation topics carry over from one scene to the next. I almost felt embarrassed for the author when I discovered that.
The real disappointment of East Grove Hills lies in the possibilities it excludes. Though the main character survives two frightening scenes, nowhere in his mind is a thought of fighting back. Isn't it time that we recognized that madmen intentionally target areas full of helpless people? Just for once, I'd like to see a game that instead of celebrating weakness, panic, or terror in such a situation, turned the tables. East Grove Hills regurgitates the same, stale, familiar theme as though everyone were helpless, instead of individuals possessed of the need to survive and defend their friends.
Worse, no-one seems to learn anything from their experiences. The ending -- if that was its purpose -- ignores the fact that it takes seriously messed-up people to do the things the game mentions; merely being an outcast isn't enough. We're talking years of parental neglect and near-abandonment, in the case of Columbine. Other cases involved use of anti-depressants which can have horrible reverse effects upon teenagers, because they are still physically maturing. As a result, the ending is lackluster.
East Grove Hills is worth playing, if just for the writing quality alone.
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