Drosophilia

This game has you working in a call center with 99 calls to finish. There are only a few options, including going to a cafeteria or looking out the window, before you go back to the main loop.

It uses video a lot; it seems to be autoplaying youtube videos that are so enlarged the youtube gui is off the screen (only autoplaying after you click a link, since Chrome disabled regular video autoplay, I think).

It's very abstract, and the game slowly changes. I played before looking at other reviews, but later sought ought more in case I was missing something big. I thought this game reminded me of Degeneracy (a parser implementation of the same concept), and I saw that Emily Short said the same thing years ago.

I rate games on a five point scale.

+Polish: A lot of effort went into this, and it was smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The sounds, videos, and text made the message clear.
-Interactivity: I was left wondering if I was missing something, and so it didn't work well for me.
-Emotional impact: I bounced off the high level of abstraction.
+Would I play again? I might; it was interesting, and I would try different paths.

If you look at the reviews for this game, you'll notice they say it has a lot of direct links to Youtube videos. You'll also notice this game was published in 2014. This is a bad sign. When I played, instead of the sweeping vistas I was (presumably) supposed to get, I was greeted with "This video is private." over and over again. Every time I went to a new room. Every time I clicked anything. There's a choice to look out the window, so I looked, and whoops! "This video is private." Rather gives the whole thing a different feeling than intended.

If you want to include Youtube videos in a game, I would recommend directly downloading and embedding the actual media file instead of using hyperlinks, for this exact reason.

Funnily enough, the author's webpage for this game mentions it was in the "Fear of Twine" exhibition, presumably an exhibition of Twine games. I went to fearoftwine.com and oh look, the domain has expired. Thankfully, WebArchive had my back and I can see the whole site with this link, though it's less a site and more a short interactive Twine page with links to other Twine games. There are even some I recognize. I might make an entry for it later.

Back to the game itself. It consists of two "worlds", for lack of a better word. One is a normal and horrifically boring office where you work your call center job doing customer support. The other is an alternate office that (Spoiler - click to show)slowly disappears over time, with words replaced by commas and periods until the entire thing is an expanse of nothing. It's a cool effect, but I'm sure it would've worked much better if the Youtube videos were actually functional. I agree that it resembles Degeneracy, but here (Spoiler - click to show)the switch between the two worlds, the normal world and the blank decaying one, is periodic and occurs every minute or so, without any way to stop it. And letting it continue to the end is how you win.

Hope I didn't miss anything with that review. It's possible that I was supposed to notice some awesome detail that was completely erased along with the Youtube videos.

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.