Rameses

Play This Thing!
Fiction of Constraint
On the whole, Rameses is a better game to remember than to be playing. I remember it as a masterpiece, but part of the mastery has to do with the ruthless way it imprisons the player in its protagonist. Alex Moran is one of the most nuanced viewpoint characters in my experience of narrative games, but he's not fun to be. And yet, through the constraints of the game play, Rameses does trick the player into some tiny sympathy with him. In static fiction this person would simply be intolerable. As an interactive character he's also pitiable, and that's a major improvement.

-- Emily Short
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SPAG
[...] Rameses manages to find the balance between turning the trials in question into melodrama (by exaggerating them) and making them too trivial to be compelling. Specifically, you're a teenager at a boarding school, enduring your two unpleasant roommates and your own homesickness, or something akin to it--and the roommates aren't monsters, they're just obnoxious. Nor is your character a misunderstood saint--he's flawed in many respects. The protagonist manages to elicit the player's sympathy despite (or perhaps because of) the game's refusal to demand such sympathy.

-- Duncan Stevens
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SPAG

The writing is solid and has a lot of character -- in some places, possibly a wee bit too much character. Still, as in several other offerings this year, the style fit perfectly the mood and environs. It reads, to my mind, something like those TV shows where a character chooses to narrate the goings-on would were they in a written format, a trick that works with the right characters and situations... which this game has.

-- Tina Sikorski
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SynTax
It is implemented well-enough but it is not a happy story. It wades through unpleasant adolescent experiences, and being stuck with a bunch of stereotypical boarding school students doesn't appeal to me at all.

-- Dorothy Millard
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Playing this character is an exercise in frustration. Every command you enter that might stand up to a bully, or leave a bad situation, or just let the PC take charge of his life in any way is wistfully brushed aside with a message like "Yeah, that'd be great, wouldn't it? But I'll never do it." Annoying, yes, but it's also the very soul of the character, and the very point of the game. In a sense, Rameses turns you into Alex's real self, struggling to get out and be heard, struggling to make a difference, only to be smacked down by fear, insecurity, and sometimes outright paranoia. In his climactic speech, the PC voices the exact torment that the player feels at every prompt -- it's an agonizing experience, and that's the point.
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