House

I beta tested this game. This is an ambitious conversational game with a parser that recognizes sentences in addition to keywords.

This increases the complexity of possible inputs to a great extent; just typing in topics isn't enough, you have to add extra words.

I beta tested this 2 or 3 times, but I never beat it until after it was released. When I beat it, I was shocked and surprised at what I hadn't seen before.

This is a well-written and interesting game, but I found the complexity of the possible inputs overwhelming.

2.5 stars. I played a bit of this. The help file is interesting, and I suspect this game has a lot of detail to it. I just found it a little odd.

You come home to find your wife standing in the living room with mascara running down her face. You've been separated for some reason of your own choosing. She feels terrible about it, you soon find out.

I know that when I've been in similar situations I've felt terrible too. And yet I can't seem to get the parser to tell me how I feel. Even "x self" reveals nothing about my emotional state.

Continuing to play, to talk with your wife, you can only query her about subjects. You speak to her like a Vulcan or a therapist, with apparently no emotions of your own. She tells you about her mother, the circumstances of how she was raised, as if you've never shared this kind of information with each other during your courtship or marriage.

It was at this point that I stopped. Maybe it changes. I just felt it oddly clunky when it came to dealing with emotions, when that is the heart of the conflict in this game.