Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

A game like I'm Fine is pretty hard to assess as a game. It's the hypertext monologue of a young gay man suffering through the most grinding lower layers of depression and hopelessness. Player choices are along the lines of ‘Take the call’ or ‘Ignore this person’, and as per the level of dysfunction of the character, tend to make little difference to his life. If you do take someone's call, you're not doing so with the wherewithal to exact a change on your existence. The communication is likely to be totally ineffectual, still drizzled with the protagonist's conviction that all is useless. I wouldn't expect otherwise from someone in this state.

I don't like assuming stuff about autobiographical qualities in games. Maybe that means I'm destined to miss the point of Twine games like this one. Maybe I'm supposed to start from a position that this is entirely confessional - in which case I would say that the author knows the dirge of the self-hating monologue very well. The experience of this game is the experience of reading the diary of someone who is morbidly depressed. Day upon day, page upon page. This kind of depression scrapes away all of the horizon, leaving only a circling in language which is devoid of individuality and consistent across sufferers who express it.

Rhetorically: Do such confessionals makes for good games? The nature of the phenomenon written about in this game makes it pretty impervious to your interactions or most other kind of digression. You'll read screen after screen of the same self-critical thought processes. If you recognise them, it's variously an unpleasant reminder, an empathy stirrer, but still basically frustrating, because you already know that all of the pages are the same - unless the only attitude you bring towards the whole game is: “I hear you and your pain.” This is an explicitly uncritical gesture that is essential to make at some point towards anyone suffering like this, but this game isn’t the person, and I can't be uncritical towards it when I am explicitly being a critic. A game is an entreaty to become involved using my thoughts, but perhaps more importantly to have some kind of Me or in-body relationship with an avatar. Again I feel this may be the principal difference between the audience that accepts this kind of game as simply an expression, and myself with all of my questions about an expression like this taking the form of a game.

If you don't recognise the thought processes expressed in this game, the experience may become a battle between your interest in perceiving something new (keep playing) and just wanting to get out once you realise that the protagonist is thoroughly convinced of the hopelessness of all actions. There is an overlap here with the mechanic of the much vaunted Depression Quest, but while I view that game as more of a novel tool/primer which can begin to educate people about the experience of depression, I’m Fine is absolutely realistic and out in the deep end.

I won't spoil the ending of the game, but I will say that I liked it and it made me feel that it had been worth persisting. 'Worth persisting' is also decent advice for the protagonist, and conceptually, the end of It's Fine is what brings the most value to the whole. The catch remains that the bulk of the game is spent moving through material that you will find almost verbatim in the diaries of the morbidly depressed or suicidal.

I continue to find it extremely difficult to interpret games like this, let alone stick a star rating on them. ( I know I don’t have to use stars, but I tend to like to be able to do so within the context created by this site. I don’t want to say something like, ‘This is too personal a game to the author for me stick a star rating on it,’ because I don’t think the author gets to decide that if they submit their game work to a site with star ratings.) Perhaps I'm not supposed to find it difficult at all; just to respond to and accept someone's expression. But in art I don't ever want to take an attitude of uncritical acceptance. Not every raw expression will make for a good game experience, no more than every cathartic expression a human being makes will be of benefit to all other humans. The expressive act itself can be the important thing. I understand that my floundering in this confessional game terrain comes because I often feel I’m being presented with the raw act and expected to find the value in that context, rather than that I should consider what decisions have been made to transform that material into a game. I want to do the latter because the material is being presented as a game.

Presumably a time will come when the author base of Quest format adventures ripens, but at this time of writing, it remains that the majority of these games (almost all of which are published online) are of the quality of learning exercises. Such is the case with The Intruder. This teeny CYOA of binary choices see the player waking one morning to the sounds of someone or something else in the house. Doing the wrong thing at any point leads you to a scary picture and sound which act as the Game Over message. In these circumstances, maybe it is scarier to convey Game Over without the use of any text, and without including any means of undoing or even restarting the game from within the main window. The trouble is that The Intruder has almost no content; the prose is ultra spare, the results of the handful of choices available are either predictable or boring – though in a broad sense you can probably intuit which choice is the wiser one to make of the two presented to you each time – and the whole thing is far too short.

In spite of all this, the "urban myth explained" win screen is curiously effective, though also likely to provoke head-scratching or laughter, since it says that (Spoiler - click to show)a man, an escaped lunatic, was the person who menaced you, but the scary graphic seems to be of a female and/or non-human monster.

Storm Cellar opens with the player driving through fields towards a sunset storm. A truck abandoned on the road blocks the way, forcing you out of your vehicle in some desolate terrain. The rustic Cicada Creek Motel is the only dwelling in sight, but is anybody home? From this traditional horror setup, Storm Cellar quickly develops an atmosphere of charged suspense and creepiness. Lit but inaccessible windows beckon mysteriously. Something is glimpsed slithering around the building. The deserted wooden decks of the motel prompt strong fears about what could be out there in all that open space. Cramped and dingy room interiors generate a different kind of insecurity.

As other reviewers have said, this game is of such high quality that it's a shame it was never expanded from this solid introductory chapter into a complete adventure. I had a feeling it might be good as early as the content warning screen, which seems to channel the introductory warnings of console-based survival horror games. In turn, I felt the positive influence of the Playstation's Silent Hill strongly throughout.

The prose is clear, measured out perfectly to breed suspense and sprinkled with dynamic atmospheric elaborations. The transitional lines of text describing your passage from one location to another are a neat touch. The puzzles are mostly about portals and blockades, doors and keys, and the yearning to find a way into each room is a strong motivator. My guess is that had more chapters of the game been created, the puzzles would have become more novel. This first chapter is about establishing access to the motel and setting the scene. It also demonstrates a smart and comprehensive parser.

Storm Cellar gave me real chills more than once and its horror elements are expertly wrangled. Usually I'm not interested in incomplete games, but as Storm Cellar is a veteran of Introcomp 2008, what exists of it is entirely functional. It also ends at a dramatically satisfying point (I.E. not just while you're walking down a hallway or something.) The game was ambitiously touted by its author as chapter zero of a pending eight, but it ended up being the only one. You should definitely play it if you like suspenseful horror.

P.S. There's no mention of the title Chapter Zero: Welcome to Cicada Creek in the game itself, only of Storm Cellar, but the author used the former title when he created the game's entry on IFDB.