Vespers

This is a game that very acvurately portrays a horrible situation, and thus left me feeling uncomfortable. Its not the kind of game I enjoy playing.

You play the abbot of a monastery that has been afflicted with plague, and you have to take control of the situation while everyone goes crazier and crazier.

The game features many npcs and strong moral choices. You can choose to do truly horrible things, including (Spoiler - click to show)rape, murder, eating corpses,etc., and egen if you choose the best paths, people around you (Spoiler - click to show)crucify others, violently commit suicide, etc.

I'm not proud that I completed this game. I came back to it years later, like scratching a scab you know you shouldn't.

This game presents a muddled and incorrect theological perspective, that isn't particularly illuminating or enlightening. This leads to the only flaws in an otherwise well-written and engaging experience.

The shoddy theology makes it hard to recognize your choices as such, but the game makes great use of your choices, so it is frustrating that the developers limited understanding of Christian theology provides some inconsistent and illogical implementation. I recommend saving and using restore/undo as needed.

The actual mechanics of this game are fairly brilliant, and the writing is excellent. There are a few minor bugs (characters aware of events that haven't happened yet), but you can avoid them--and improve the overall experience--by restricting yourself to using "talk to character" instead of the more open-ended "ask".

Some of the puzzles are quite clever, and almost all of them involve multiple outcomes. Keep this in mind as you play; you are not restricted to the most obvious solutions. In this, the game does get closer to a proper Christian theology, although it still misunderstands the significance of this decision.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit and think it is well-done. Yes, there is some unsettling imagery, but I would rate it as "less disturbing than CSI".