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Quirky e-mail game with an aggressive bot, November 7, 2021I enjoyed what I played of this Twine game. Other reviewers have noted that there were false endings; I think I quit after the first one not knowing there was more, but I played enough to write a review.
The spam zapper's voice is well-done and entertaining to read. Its personality reminds me of the drones in Iain M. Banks "Culture" series, with a quirky but aggressive personality.
While other reviews have noted that the game is quite long, especially given that the tone of the game is very light, the bite-sized email format works well. Each email is rarely more than a few heights of the screen and is easily digestible.
The game has custom CSS styles that are fairly simple. The majority of the game is on a simple white page set against a grey background. I assume this is meant to resemble the Microsoft Office workspaces of the late 90s, which works thematically even though email clients didn't follow that look.
There is also a very busy black theme with jumbled text in the background a few times in the game; thankfully that is not used for every screen in the game but it is fine the few times it shows up.
I hesitate to rate the game for two reasons. First, like a lot of Twine games there is not a lot of gameplay; the writing quality carries most of the game.
Second, it's squarely in the "weird topic sim" genre of games, like "You Are Jeff Bezos" and (outside of IF) "Goat Simulator." Those games (even if they are decent and had work put into them) sort of feign being low brow through their weird choice of topic. They get by on being viral and become love-it-or-hate it games.
"Spamzapper" seems more heartfelt and genuine than many of those games; on the other hand the fact that those comparisons come to mind mean that it has less of a bar to clear to stand out as a legitimate work.
So it is a good game worth checking out but not one that is easy to rate.
