Strangers in the Night

Baf's Guide

You're a vampire, out for a feeding. Rather monotonous, unfortunately--you find people to kill, you kill them, and move on, and most of them don't put up much of a fight, nor is there much chance you'll get caught. The most interesting part of the game is the killing itself, actually: you learn something about each of your victims at the point of death, through some sort of telepathy, and what you learn is sometimes rather unnerving--but the game takes away points when you do that because you're putting yourself at risk or some such thing. Points or no, it's almost worth playing for those moments alone--the game, a la Anne Rice, hints at a somewhat more complicated story, but doesn't go anywhere with it.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Strangers In The Night starts out with a cool premise: You are a vampire, and you awaken with a terrible thirst for blood. You must feed on at least three different victims (draining each only a little, so as not to arouse undue attention.) However, it's the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year... and so you have only a limited time to slake your desires. Done well, this could be a sort of undead Varicella, where with every iteration of the game you figure out more and more about how to satisfy your needs. Unfortunately, Strangers In The Night turns out to be more of an undead Fifteen. You wander around an extremely minimally described cityscape (most rooms have no description at all) solving rudimentary puzzles, most of which just amount to unlocking a door, then walking in and typing "BITE <victim>". What little writing is present has some nicely gothic moments -- I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the PC's apartment. On the other hand, it is also riddled with a goodly number of errors, including two in the first two sentences. Misspellings, plural/possessive errors, awkward phrasings -- they're all there.
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SynTax
The atmosphere throughout STRANGERS is dark, brooding and very gothic, with well-described locations and believable characters. This game is NOT recommended for children - although there is no obvious blood-and-guts type of violence, there is a very dark and adult feel to the whole game.

-- Bev Truter
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