Ratings and Reviews by Nomad

Great premise: A self-invented game world with a self-invented religious system, and some ritual is going on. Plenty directions to go from here.

Unfortunately, neither the religious system nor the game world are being fleshed out. You're a vampire, you've done bad, you're punished, then you go to a dungeon to fight a deity, and that's it.

The game world has potential and I really want to know more about it, and because of this I was very tempted to give a third star, but in the end the game disappointed me because of its shallowness. I'll follow the author tho, because potential is definitely there.

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.

An interesting story frame, to say something positive. A very cliché-ridden fantasy world. Quite some slips of the pen - wrong genders, pronouns without attributions etc. The playthrough I chose was very, very dull (Spoiler - click to show)("Patriarch-Bischof, you're evil!" - "Yeah right, sorry. Won't happen again." - "Okay bye!") but other paths may be more interesting. Contains music that suits very well. I wish the author would work on a parser game with emphasis on the game world, for imho that's where he shines.

Story: The prologue of the The Awakening series (that never came to life) doesn't have much of a story. You start in an every day situation, then you are transported into a sci-fi world, and then the prologue is over. Would one want to know more? Not me. 2/5.

Writing: Solid minimalism. Decent by late 1990's standard, but this one was written in 2010. Almost a 3, but quite a few stylistic bloopers. 2/5.

Puzzles: Game's on rails, and it's only seven moves to the end, so there's not that much puzzle to place. 1/5.

Implementation: That little game that there is is implemented solidly. Parser fails if you try odd stuff, but you don't have you, so it's... sufficient. 3/5.

Fun: Ends before it can become interesting. 1/5.

The verdict: 1.9/5 - A bad experience. But then, it's the author's first (and only, as it seems) attempt at writing IF. I bet chapter two would have been a 2.9.

The works of James Graham Ballard offer a very(!) interesting background for IF games. The author of this one, Mike Bonsall, is not exactly a novice to the works of Ballard. Problem is, his approach to IF is a different one to that which most players would want to take.

Bonsall manages to capture Ballard's writing style and his world building. That's hardly a miracle, with Bonsall having profound knowledge of Ballard's works. But the game is flawed in two ways that spoil it for pretty much every player: Wrong moves lead to your death, and the implementation is minimal. Like, you have two directions to chose from and chose the first one, and you die. And there's an exit east through a door but you can't go east or open the door but have to type "enter door". Sorry Mike, but Scott Adams did better, back in 1978.

So, while the game world and the writing are awesome, the game sucks as f**k. Due to the "wrong exit = death" policy a reworking would be very laborous. This one's a fail, unfortunately.