Barcarolle in Yellow

This is an atmospheric horror parser game, where you play a film actress, and end up caught in a bizarre series of events in 1970s Venice. If you’ve seen the film Don’t Look Now it absolutely has the feel of that. And the terror is real. Especially for me as a woman playing. Yet it was still an appealing world that I felt happy to be immersed in, as much as I didn’t want bad things to happen. Venice is one of my favourite places in the world. We go there in the depths of winter, when it’s so spooky. And quiet.

Where the game falls down is in the implementation. Timing is critical in many scenes, so it’s a special problem if you run into fight the parser problems. So many logical alternative commands are not supported. It makes it less smooth to play than it should be. There are also quite a lot more typos than I expected. I wonder if the game writing time was a bit tighter than the author might like. More playtesting could definitely have helped.

However it was a very atmospheric game. It captured much of the Venice I recognise. And I enjoyed playing. I just wish the implementation had been a bit smoother.

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