Charlie The Robot

This game employs so much jargon, writes in so many perspectives and presents all of these in such a wide variety of interfaces that it becomes clear that the reader is expected to, in one way or another, resign him/herself to the fact that he/she is not going to be able to keep track of all the plots and subplots that develop in the game. (That was, at least, how it was for me, though of course I might just be coming up with a convenient excuse to escape the task of unravelling the story's intricacies.) Yet, it is precisely this freedom from having to pay attention to every nuance and detail that contributed in large part to my enjoyment of the game. It didn't feel exploratory, exactly; there was a plot going on, and I was genuinely interested to learn more about the characters as the story progressed. But even so, many questions were left unanswered. I think this style of writing, in which a world is built that relies a lot on the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks, is a fine line to tread. Personally, I loved it, but it's not as though I don't identify with players who might be dissatisfied with the jumble of text and media that comes their way, because that was certainly how I felt in the beginning.

In any case, I would recommend this game for the writing and the humour alone. I think the introduction of real-world questions about robots was a little too in-your-face, and could have been handled more smoothly, but otherwise everything flowed well. Superb flashback sequences, and laugh-out-loud moments that really hit home.