Violet

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Text-Based Computer Game Features Graduate Student as Main Character
This reporter, whom Violet nicknamed her vegemite, her muttonplum and her mintchip, could not get past Chapter 3. Along with the noisy neighbor, Julia, my character’s exhaustion prevented me from getting any work done. Which is too bad, I guess, because I’ll never know what surprise Violet said she had in store for her “randy little wildebeest” if he finished his paper in time.
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Gaming Enthusiast
[...] Violet (2008) might have been as well named Procrastination: The Game. It’s not often that I find a game so relatable.
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Jay Is Games
Ultimately, though, the formal invention of having the game speak in Violet's voice would not be worth much if the story weren't so well-observed... The main characters of Violet have real feelings for one another, and a real investment in their relationship — and underneath the goofiness and the cute pet-names, their problem is plausible and serious.
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Rock Paper Shotgun
Whilst playing, I certainly found myself questioning my relationship with my girlfriend, shall we say, and that recognition turned into open farce as the scenario escalated. I felt. I laughed. I enjoyed.
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SPAG
The game's design makes solving each puzzle rather unrewarding. In a conventional adventure, a difficult puzzle solved usually means more rooms to explore, or some sort of significant narrative development. Here, it just means that you get to be thwarted in your efforts to write by something else. Sure, you're making progress, but it doesn't feel like terribly rewarding progress. And the thing is, the puzzles don't need to be this hard. All of the game's strengths -- the try anything to see what happens playfulness, the amusing narrator, the endless little gags and clever asides, and ultimately the resolution of the PC's romantic and career crisis -- would have stood just as well with more straightforward, clearly clued puzzles.
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ferkung
Violet (2008) by Jeremy Freese - Full Playthrough
We play through the absolutely adorable little vegemite of a game called Violet.

Maybe a little too real, it's a procrastination simulator with an absurdly great voice.
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50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Violet would become one of IF’s most famous examples of an unusual narrator, sweeping all the community’s awards the year of its release. In the game you play a graduate student in the midst of a years-long dissertation slump, chronically unable either to write or to accept that you’re not going to finish. When the story opens you’ve been given an ultimatum by your long-suffering girlfriend Violet, who’s threatened to leave you and fly back home to Australia if you don’t make concrete progress on a final make-or-break day.
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