Shrapnel

Okay, it's hard to say much without giving away the story but...

First of all, you are in a small area similar to Zork's white house. And you get killed. Then you restart and get killed a different way. And so forth.

One of my big complaints in this one is the lack of interactivity. There are 4 or 5 rooms you just wander around in until some plot happens. The big gimmick here is the way the game interprets things (Spoiler - click to show) Such as forcing you to RESTART when given the quit or restart options on death

I am a big fan of Cadre's other games, to the point where I am now seeking out his other works to play them. This one didn't strike me, however. There was a lot of info dump at the end, and little interactivity.

What was interesting was the choice of medium. For the style of story he was writing, he had 2 choices: IF, or Short Film (in a memento style). The use of IF was daring here, and he is definately one to experiment with his IF styles, and for that I give him credit. This one, I just didn't feel. Even photopia, with its limited choices, gave the illusion of freedom, and I-0 seemed way open, with multiple branches to the ending. With this one, most of the game was pressing the space bar to advance the text, and that wasn't what I was looking for with the IF.

Still, if you're a fan of the story- the story itself is fairly interesting.

I loved the gimmick to this game, something that I doubt would have worked so well in another medium, so I was disappointed to find that the story was fairly shallow. Everything was very linear, and there was little to draw the player in, so the gimmick fell flatter than it could have in a more deeply involved game, and the canned explanation it got at the end, while creative, spoiled a lot of the surreality that was the main reason it worked for me in the first place.

Overall it's a good stylistic experiment, and I just wish it could have been executed in a more emotionally satisfying way.