Exorcist Tipline

In this game, you are an exorcist, shunned by normal people. After a compelling intro, you enter a small town with a grid-like map and spend 49 days exploring the map, hearing about ghost cases and solving problems.

This is one of the last two games not to get ratings. Once I started it, it became crystal clear why that was so. Further play only strengthened my initial impression.

This is a fantastic game that seems deadset on making it very hard for the player to experience it. It has achingly slow text; double clicking can speed it up, but even when sped up, it was still deeply slow (I’d click 5-10 times per paragraph). In a short game, that can be a moderate annoyance, but this is one of the longest games in the competition.

You have 49 days to investigate different cases. Each day you have a possibility of receiving messages on your answering machine, telling you where to go on a map. You have the option to investigate a square, do divination at a square, go to the library, ward yourself, or rest.

Cases have timers; people can just die if you’re too slow. But cases also overlap, so you’ll get urgent messages each day. But, and I can’t stress this enough, picking the wrong option wastes an entire day with no way to undo or save. Compounding this is the fact that every few nights ghosts get closer and closer to your bed and will kill you if you don’t Ward yourself. So if you pick the wrong option on a case, you waste a day, someone may die in a case you didn’t pursue, you yourself have to ward again so that you don’t die, and a huge chunk of the game has passed.

Dying puts you back to a checkpoint. There was a strange coin button on my screen that I thought picked where my checkpoints were if I clicked on it, but I later realized it was a stray sprite left over from the divination.

All told, this makes this an very player-unfriendly game. I suspect that the time never played through the full game without using cheats of some kind; this kind of thing can usually be picked up on by people playing their own games repeatedly (if it’s not fun for you without cheats, it won’t be fun for players). And I’ve seen these kinds of design patterns before; there’s a fear that players will just skim your text and lawnmower your game, so one approach is to slow down text, remove saves, add harsh consequences, obscure choices (for instance, if you pick a wrong conversation path in the game, you can die or lose a case with no undo), etc. All of this makes it impossible to speed-read or lawnmower. But there are other ways to get engagement; the game already has multiple interesting goals and engaging puzzles. Just taking away the slow text and the night time deaths would make the game way more fun.

Behind all of these barriers mentioned above, the game itself is fantastic. Great hand-made art, really good writing with distinct characters and unique plotlines, and fun coin and map-based mechanics.

Getting to the end was excruciating. I’m not sure how many people will be willing to finish this game as-is. But if there were ever a new version that at least removed the slow text timer and added at least one more player friendly feature (like saves or a limited undo feature, or a guide or walkthrough, or taking away the random deaths), then I would be able to heartily recommend the excellent parts of this game.