Ratings and Reviews by virtuadept

Turandot. Oh! Turandot! What is not to love about thee? Your delicate prose dances across the page like a world-class ballerina. Your enormous… adjectives, tempt even the most chaste of readers. Your delicious humor tastes as sweet as cotton candy! No, wait, that would be all sugar and no substance! Your humor is more like chocolate, a bit bitter at first, but a love affair guaranteed to end in tragic over-indulgence! Turandot. My time with you was short, but oh, so sweet. Dearest fans of IF, if you cannot tell, I am smitten by this lovely work of fiction. I dare say, it might stay on my mind for weeks, months, even years? Such a story of love, hate, death, redemption… I shall not reveal more, a gentleman never tells.

I laughed. I cried. A philosopher died. This was a true hoot. A real laugh fest. I mean, you kind of have to have a bit of a dark streak in you to appreciate a lot of the humor, which I most certainly possess. This IF is almost entirely dialogue: witty, informative, descriptive, contemplative, and most especially so-funny-my-sides-hurt dialogue. And yet there is still a serious side to this, obviously given the subject matter. This story entertains, educates, and keeps you guessing. It keeps you wanting more. It is not extremely long, probably around 1 hour to see most of it with a replay. Keep in mind this game deals with adult themes, but is not graphic in its descriptions. You know the ending, but it's the ride, ahem, the journey, that makes this one great.

This slightly interactive story has, as far as I can tell, two meaningful choices. You do drag words onto other words to show more text and get more description, but more often than not, that doesn't change the plot. I haven't played a lot of "Texture" games. So I will try to refrain from commenting about that aspect of it and focus instead on the narrative.

The story is very, very short. I think it takes maybe 10 minutes to do a full play-through and another 2 or 3 to replay it to get the only other ending and try some of the other non-meaningful branches.

You may or may not get some adult language depending on some of those branches, but either way that doesn't change your ending choices. This kind of felt like those scenes in movies with something gratuitous that add nothing to the story and feel like they were just to get an R rating.

As a very-short form work of IF, it's not really bad. I have played shorter ones that I enjoyed better (9:05 comes to mind). Generally with a really short IF it is more enjoyable for me personally if there's a few other branches to explore to try to get different results.

Some of the descriptions are a little, uh.. pretentious-sounding? But if you consider from the perspective of the protagonist, maybe that fits into the character, so I will chalk it up as the descriptions fitting the characterization of the characters.

One issue that I do have with the narrative is that it seems to impose the protagonists' view of art upon the player. Maybe that's just me, it just felt a bit heavy-handed in its preaching about Art and not so very nuanced about it. I get what the author is saying. Or at least, what they are saying about the protagonist. I disagree with it, but hey, to each their own. I did enjoy playing this game, it's worth 5 or 10 minutes.