Reviews by BrettW

I’ve never really been keen on Western courtly intrigue. There’s always been something blunt and stodgy about it, like a beef wellington of ideas. But the Eastern version, oh man, I am there with bells on. you are are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion captures that style of Chinese political machinations really quite well. Different characters and factions are captured by a single but intricate philosophy. The court is sacred, yet everyone in it is in some way profane.

You are an unwitting poet dragged into the middle of the intrigue and have been tasked to speak the truth as an outsider and a wordsmith. Your explorations and responses to the philosophies of other people you meet prepare your mind for the task of creating a poem that will change the very fate of the kingdom.

This reminded me a bit of Imprimatura, although you are.. is more direct with regards to the gameplay loop, but more indirect in terms of the poetry/art. I enjoyed the poetry and it felt very in-theme and there were a few delicious plums of poetic lines throughout.

I got endings 5, 7, 8 and 16, and could tie the final story with the choices I made, although less so with the final poem. I feel like that’s on me, though, rather than the author. I did manage to get the elusive fifth line option once.

I loved the visual change of gradient and image with different scenes. It felt like a careful, evocative choice.

Throughout the piece are occasional anachronistic-sounding lines, which signal modern allegories and criticisms. For example, the cult of poets arranging themselves in a vast array in a polo field is a sly discussion about AI generation. In general, the writing was poetic yet down-to-earth --- a great embodiment of the protagonist.

I had minor troubles with the UI, but once you got the rhythm and standards for cyclic vs non-cyclic links, it was fine. I felt like the main text box could have been larger, but that was no big deal.

I’d like to see behind the scenes to know how the endings worked. 23 endings is curious to me as a mathematician, but maybe various options collapsed into one.

I quite enjoyed the game, although I may not be dedicated enough to find all 23 endings. The clockwise/counter-clockwise choice at the end seemed rather strong.

In Final Call, you play a down-on-your-luck con man. But unsympathetically so: you've seemingly ditched your partner Mike at a previous job, and your long-suffering girlfriend Roxy - aren't they all called Roxy? - is dragged through yet another mud puddle of your failure and she's had enough. I imagined a slimy but somehow likeable jerk like Worm from Rounders. Out of guilt or a chance at redemption, you've taken on one last job with Mike: a simple little trick to flog money from a casino. No problems.

Of course it's a trap and Mike has gotten his revenge. You wake up and your casino job has become something like a Saw movie. Abandoned buildings, cracked mirrors, mysterious corpses and a feeling that you're being watched.

I have to admit the setup was pretty obvious, which is A-okay for horror movies. It's a warmup for anticipating worse things. But the setup was drawn out. Several paragraphs said pretty much the same thing and there was quite a lot of tell, and not a lot of show, in the old writing parlance. Each character was sketched very loosely and you are given a chance to name yourself, but it doesn't pay off in any way that I could see.

The main horror gameplay involves exploring a thoroughly unsettling building to find some clues to type on a typewriter. Why? Not sure. Why is Mike and the casino dropping you in a place like this? Not sure. What do they get out of it? Not sure. If you were to be carved up by Jigsaw, they gave you a hell of a lot of latitude to just walk about. There were hand-waves towards a chilling message by the organizers, but it never really pays off.

Some of the bite-sized set pieces are dripping with atmosphere. The secret found on the body is properly chilling, for example. But others are just sorta creepy rooms with nothing more going on. You are encouraged to return to rooms, but this does something meaningful once, maybe once-and-a-half times.

There are a few instances where you can choose to do something different and get different information, but none of it is exceptionally enlightening. I managed to smash through the story in maybe 15 minutes and got to a "nice ending". But it was an ending like a dead end - it just kinda stopped. I played through again, doing things slightly differently and seeing different details, but nothing radical. I chose a completely different ending which attempted to explain the backstory for the creepy building, but didn't really.

In horror you want to dunk your audience into a deep vat of questions. Unsettling questions that they might not want answers to, but are driven towards. Final Call had all the aesthetics trappings of horror, but didn't quite fulfill it in gameplay or writing. With the same attention to atmosphere and perhaps a longer polish on the writing, future games from Emily and Zoe could do well at Ectocomp.