A Sugared Pill

Sometimes you feel sorry for not sticking with a game, because you can tell there's good stuff there. But there's a reason you stop playing. It's like a breakup where, despite the good stuff, there's just things you can't put up with anymore.

"A Sugared Pill" starts with a rather tense opening. The fact that it seems tense and timed but is actually not timed at all doesn't diminish its effectiveness. It also immediately displays a clickable action bar, which essentially lists exists plus the other occasional convenience. It serves as a good exit lister even if you don't use the mouse.

My issue with the game was, through and through, the experience. For a game which makes a big deal of "convenience" when entering what will soon be your mode of transportation - a car, which you automatically open and close, lock and unlock, and start the ignition of; which is all stuff that a game should probably do anyway, and only the games which are too simualtionistic for their own good implement so deeply as to be an obstacle to the player - there were quite a few sticky places where the parser either exasperated me or just couldn't get what I was trying to achieve.

Add to that a beginning which becomes somewhat aimless and has you doing stuff "just because it's there", and I soon realised I didn't want to continue. My rating of "1" is because of my personal metric. If the game made me want to stop so abruptly, I can't really consider its good spots; what good are they, if the game made me want to stop?

The first time I felt a pang of annoyance was in the very first puzzle. I'll spoil it here. Really, don't read this if you haven't solved the first puzzle. Essentially, it shows the parser annyoing me by first not properly responding to what seems like disambiguation, and then not accepting the word which it itself used to describe an object. And no, I did not go out of my way to look for these annoyances, this is what I did on my playthrough.(Spoiler - click to show) >BURN BEAR: "Not a bad idea. But what will you light it with?" >lighter: "There's no verb in that sentence!" >burn bear with lighter: "Woah! The bear ignites far too easily and burns brightly. Molten pieces of plastic fur begin to drip onto the ground and within seconds it's not so much a soft toy as a fireball." >throw fireball at hitman: "I don't know the word "fireball"."

Soon after this sequence you arrive to another location where you start finding yourself doing things for little reason. Partly because all your attention is focused on a certain building, but all your attempts to enter the building fail - apparently because the game doesn't understand your attempts to enter the building, or go building, or climb stairs (which are explicitly mentioned), or go in (if you "go in", you enter the car instead). So instead of the very important building, you go off in the opposite direction into a hotel. You rent a room (not really a spoiler) for no reason or motivation at all. You start doing stuff in the hotel for really no reason.

The hotel room door sometimes seems to allow you to cross it by going in its direction. Sometimes, though, it stops you and tells you its closed. If you try to open it, it may tell you it's locked. If you try to unlock it, it may ask you what with, and if you answer "key", it may ask you which do you mean, the hotel room key or the car key. Once you go through the door once, apparently it does these things more automatically, unless you happen to lock the door behind you after you leave, as I did. In which case the whole thing starts again when you want to get into the room.

Sorry, but this is where the "convenience" really should have been programmed in, instead of making a very simulated car and then making shortcuts for it (a less simulated car would have done just as well. Implementing something just deeply enough is an artform).

The thing about all of this is that whenever I try something the game isn't expecting, the game just fails to acknowledge it. Where's the simulation now? I try to throw a hose out the window to get it out of the hotel, I try to attach that hose to the sink, and, just as when I was trying to get into the building, my problem is not that the game doesn't allow me; the problem is that the game seems not to understand what I'm attempting at all, prompting me to reword it many times in increasing frustration.

What you do get is a detailedly implemented television which has channels you can flip through and volume you can raise or lower. Dunno whether it's used in any puzzles. There's a feeling of the author having focused on the wrong things.

The point at which I gave up was when I checked the walkthrough and saw I had to "look behind" something, to reveal something that really should have been revealed by a simple "examine". "Look behind" is a doozy to have in any game, because, just like you don't know whether something is interesting until you "examine" it and so you have to "examine" everything, "look behind" is the same. It's a can of worms. Unless you give the player reason to look behind something (and this game doesn't), then do you expect to player to look behind every item you implement? Because, since the player doesn't know what you implemented, the player will have to do that.

In this case, there is really no reason for this unprompted "look behind X" (the description only contains prompting in hindsight. It's insufficient), as what gets reveled is perfectly in scope for being part of a regular "examine".

At this point, I'd had enough. I felt that whatever the game was doing well (the premise is not uninteresting) it was more than offset by the aimlesness, the unmotivated actions, the struggles with the parser, and this last "puzzle". I did not wish to continue the experience.

Oh, another thing which annoyed me. The player's gender. It is unstated for quite a while, and for some reason I thought the player was female. Probably because in the intro it says they won a stuffed bear in karaoke by singing Whitney Houston. >X ME says "You look about the same as always." You can accuse me of stereotyping, if you wish, but a player kinda needs something to latch on to; as I visualise the action, it helps to visualise who the PC is. When I saw that other people were addressing the PC as "sir", it was jarring, and then I realised that the PC was male. I simply would have wished for more clarity from the get go. It doesn't change anything in the game or the story, from what I saw, but it was yet another wrench in the works. If the PC is gendered, be it binary or non-binary, and the player doesn't get it and builds a mental image that turns out to be wrong later, that's a negative experience for the player which the author could have avoided by being clearer.