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Review
(Be sure to press the "Restart" button as the game starts, so you can hear the background music.)
This intro is approximately five minutes long. It's a censorship simulator, kinda like The Westport Independent.
The core gameplay loop is picking True (approved) or False (censored), where each option has a certain percentage chance of "success." But you only get to make one example True/False decision, and one real one, before the game ends.
Right at the end, it implies that getting more "successes" will unlock higher access levels, but you never get a chance to actually level up, or even to directly see what's at stake if you do/don't level up.
The author is Yoon Ha Lee. I'm a fan of his Machineries of Empires series of sci-fi novels, in which adherence to a calendar system (supported by violent rituals called "rememberences") unlocks magic-tech powers. In this setting, maintaining the calendar requires ideological control, which is constantly under threat from "calendrical heresy."
A censorship simulator in Machineries of Empires sounds pretty cool! But none of that is actually here in the intro we have.
Indeed, there's so little here that it's hard to evaluate it at all. Will it work as a game? Does it need a lot more gameplay than just the True/False censorship game loop? There's just not enough here to prove the concept.
