The Golden King

Golden King

Damon Wakes likes to push the boundaries of what is considered IF. This year I'm thinking of it less like a 'this is really important for me personally to establish what is IF and what isn't' and more like 'this is a poll by Damon and it's my turn to vote'. For me, I wouldn't want to see more like this. Fullscreen 3d engine games with sound go against most the reason I like IF (discreteness, gameplay that can be started and stopped). I did like the Ultraviolent Unicorn game and would like more of it, and have been avoiding UI3. Sometimes even the 'bad' games are 'good'. I rated The Miller's Garden very low and it's currently the lowest-rated game by Wakes that isn't an Uninteractive Fiction game, but I included it in my longlist of favorite games, because it just stuck in my brain for some reason, the mundane inevitability of loss.

Anyway, this game, as I said, I didn't like as much. It's not even the 3d engine and voiceover; the game 2/5 by BenyDanette is a french/english bilingual unity game where you make choices walking down hallways that have printed text in them and voice overs. I liked its introspection. I think the reason I liked this less was simply the lack of printed text.

Morality-wise it was interesting. It's a gdevelop game where you play as a chess king and everywhere you move, things turn to gold. I intentionally turned trees to gold and got a voice over and guards to gold. The whole time my wife and child spoke and laughed with each other. I knew there might be some ending, but I decided to simply stop playing. The laughter of my child was beautiful, and in my immersion I didn't want to silence it, and only not playing could guarantee that it wouldn't permanently end (though of course, ironically, turning off the game silences it).