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A comedy in four parts about exciting games of instinct and wits, set in childhood. Not necessarily for children.
26th Place - 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2016)
| Average Rating: based on 9 ratings Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 2 |
This is a story of growing up that does not shy away from showing the terrible things kids can do to each other. It contains very frank depictions of bullying, violence and rape that could hit a bit too close to home for some people, but it has a powerful message about the cost of complacency that I think people should experience.
In this game, you are reading through diary entries of a young child going through several years of school. It's a twine-type game, and it has a large scope, going through several years at a fast space.
You have several friends you interact with, with mechanics keeping track of the relationships, but I found this fairly opaque; I wished I had more feedback on my choices. One nice feature was that choices you were not able to make due to past choices were crossed out, showing you 'what could have been'.
The game treats very serious subjects, including sexual assault. The biggest drawback to me was having trouble seeing how my choices relate to the pages you reach.
The Breakfast Review
I personally found it quite interesting to see how our relationships with various characters changed from one playthrough to the next ... although, fair warning, I don't think a lot of them matter to the final crisis and resolution. I would have liked to have pursued more alternatives with these characters, though: see what happens if I join with the bullies, or try to be better friends with one character or another.
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The Stack
This is a fairly brutal look at childhood. It takes the form of a series of diary entries written by a schoolboy over the course of four years, from the ages 10 through 13. Each entry ends in a choice, or occasionally two choices in succession. The choices don’t always correspond to decisions on the part of the player character — sometimes you just decide how the PC felt about something that happened. That’s because what you’re really choosing here isn’t primarily the sequence of events, but what kind of person the PC is becoming.
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