Reviews by Nomad

Clicking through hyperlinks to find a path that lets you get on with the story. Time limit. Snack-sized game. Not my thing. Setting has potential though.

You're just clicking through text. Not even "choices" to chose from. As a simple text the concept is not too bad - the text is divided into 24 chapters, mimicing an advent calendar. As a game, it fails completely.

'Nuff said. Five minutes playtime, and being a hamster allows for some unusual and funny situations. The "intro" is a bit confusing and the parser is not very sophisticated, but the game is won before you even notice that. If I had to limit myself to one word only, it'd be "cute".

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)Not an actual game. A situation, some choices, one page of text per choice, the end. Yawn.

I'm not particular fond of CYOA-style "games". This one hooked me on though. The setting (a company special investigator arrives at a company-owned research site in remote, snow-covered Norway to find out about a missing team) is fairly fresh, the story and it's pacing are crisp and the writing is excellent - not too brief, not sprawling, but to the point in a way that lets you visualize scenery and action. The author gets something out of the limited "game" mechanics by locking the player from information through the choices she makes. I'm sure there's alternative endings and I have the feeling those are only determined by the last three or four choices, but that's just guesswork. For a gamebook this is an excellent piece of entertainment. If you're a kid, or you're easily scared by anything more scary than Sesame Street, be warned - the secret agent story gets a slightly lovecrafty twist during its course.

The game starts with a classic plot: Three girls visit the remote country house if a distant relative with the intention to have a party there. The relative is not at home, the girls enter the house and settle down, a storm rises, the house has an old secret, and the girls discover an old ouja board. The writing is nice in general; sonetimes one has the impression that it's based on an English story as some terms seem to be clumsy translations.

The interactivity is limited to navigating through the house and examining about one item per room by clicking on it. In the beginning this has a bit of potential as a story begins to unfold, but a few clicks later the game is over without answering any questions. The term "game" thus seems a bit toplofty. Worth the ten minutes read, but forgotten soon.

"Phone in Mouth" is a short story about a journalist discovering the subculture of "oralphones", people who put their smartphones into their mouths. As the term "short story" indicates it's not a game. The writing isn't remarkably bad, but "interactive" means more than occasionally pressing a "continue" button.

The game comes with several comfort features and may very well get interesting some time into the story, but hilarious parser problems prevent initial progress.

Lost and Found plays in modern day Tokyo, but not in the glitzy entertainment districts, but in the unhurried suburbs. The player is a homeless tutor who lives in a park near a school and encounters a female teacher who leaves an enduring footprint in his life.

The setting is fresh and well fleshed out. As a game, Lost and Found sucks as it's just a gamebook with merely a handfull of choices to make. But the writing is good, the story is good, the pacing is good, and so it's a good read. Done in 15 minutes, but it's exciting and emotionally affecting. Recommended for people who love fresh settings and who don't expect a game to be an actual game.

The game plays in an alternate reality which is just like our world, except for that vampires co-exist as a small minority among humans. Most humans are not very fond of the vampires, some are downright racist, even violent. You play a human adolescent who's forced to live with a vampire family for a while. The story is full of action, romance and the occasional sociocritical undertone.

For literature, "The Vampire House" is too shallow. It's obviously written for adolescents, and not for the "Catcher in the Rye" reading type of adolescents. At times it reads like a dime novel, which would be okay for a piece of interactive fiction. Unfortunately, as a gamebook it lacks interactivity. Page after page after page it's just text, until finally a decision is required, usually just to boost different stats that might come in handy much later. Like, each evening you can chose between "studying" and "workout" (and a few minor things). This gets repetitive pretty soon. The story slowly hints at two greatly differing ends, but the way there gets more and more boring.

Adolescents might find this gamebook entertaining. Others better look elsewhere.