Shackles of Control

My first impressions of Shackles of Control were negative. There are frequent spelling and other language errors, such as “appressing” for “oppressing”, “baren” for “barren”, and such phrases as “Where could everyone gone?” and “magnitudes of CDs”. Together with the your-school-is-suddenly-abandoned plot and the fact that pressing “Credits” seems to end your game prematurely, this made me feel that Shackles of Control was just a lazy game, badly put together.

And then I arrived at an ending that involved a suddenly abusive narrator, a countdown timer to my death, over-the-top music and a fake button puzzle to give me false hope. This made me laugh out loud. Turns out the entire game is built around the conceit of having the player stray from the story in weird ways and having this strain their relationship with the narrator. The ending with the timer and buttons was perhaps the funniest, but there are some other amusing paths to discover as well.

I understand that the game might be more than a little inspired by The Stanley Parable, but since I’m unfamiliar with that piece, I can’t comment on the extent of the similarities or dissimilarities.

The complaints from my first paragraph still stand, of course. But I ended up having fun, and that counts for more than a little.

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