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Review
major spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)This game cannot be completed without also playing Enkii in the same browser at the same time. This review will cover both games, as the author requests judges to rate them as a single entity.
Who doesn't want to visit Scotland? In "Under Loch," you are an American tourist called Karen experiencing the splendor and beauty of the Scottish countrysi—oh no, wait. Wait. You've been tricked by overenthusiastic travel blogs into visiting an artificial pond in a humdrum park. Still, the sandwich is nice.
At first, it might seem this is literally just a "sit and eat your sandwich" game. You can click the "take a bite" link as many times as you wish, and nothing in particular will happen. Eventually, you will get a suggestion to come back later.
The rest of this review is all major spoilers. If you haven't already revealed that first spoiler and want to figure out the mystery of what lies under the loch for yourself, stop reading here!
(Spoiler - click to show)Once you've gotten tired of eating bits of sandwich, it's time to open up Enkii. In Enkii, you play a Scottish university student called Susan who's specialising in biology, and who is working in the room underneath the loch to study the fish, who are quite miserable and poorly. The only problem? You've somehow locked yourself inside, and don't have the key. All you do have is a walkie-talkie, which is miraculously charged and in working order. If only someone on the other side will answer it! Just like "Under Loch," you can click that "cry for help" link all you want and nothing will happen if you haven't opened the other game yet. (I actually played Enkii first, and ended up downloading the file to see what I was supposed to do.) From there on, it's a matter of switching between tabs in your browser to advance the story, as Susan and Karen make polite but awkward conversation while Karen tries to find the key and Susan tries to wait patiently until she can escape. The story is linear, other than the tab-switching. Although both pieces of the game sometimes offer you different dialogue options, none make a difference to how the story progresses.(all right, that's the mechanical spoiler. The rest of this is story-relevant spoiler!)
(Spoiler - click to show) As Susan looks for the key and the two talk, we start to get little hints that there's a tiny bit more going on than just "get Susan out of the fish observation room." A reference from Karen to the pandemic makes Susan think about Hong Kong, and Karen's comment that she's rereading 1984 make Susan laugh and comment that it's "the perfect time" to be rereading that. Eventually, Susan fishes the key out of the loch and unlocks the door, which has started to vibrate. But wait! There's nobody there! Was it all a prank? In fact, what we're dealing with is a time slip situation. Karen meets Susan, all grown up and older than her, and holding a walkie talkie.While the way the game is set up was interesting from a technical standpoint, and I did enjoy the concept and story bits, in the end I wanted a little more to do with this one.
