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A bit out of focus, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My freshman year of high school, somebody stole my glasses. I wasn’t as nearsighted then as I am now (and I wasn’t farsighted at all – ah, to be young again!), so I was able to struggle through the day, but it was still a disorienting experience; I remember squinting at blackboards, at faces, at the TV, hesitant and having to constantly guess at what I was seeing, who I was talking to. It was an object lesson in how fragile one’s sense of stability in the world can be – and also an object lesson about the cluelessness of teenaged boys, because turns out the culprit was a dormmate who’d drawn my name for Secret Santa and decided it’d be funny to give me back a bunch of my own stuff.
So I think the inciting incident in Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses has legs; waking up after a nap at your school’s Literature Club room to find them missing, of course you’d drop everything, and even grill your close friends, to get them back. Unusually for a ChoiceScript game, there aren’t any stats governing your travails (or at least if there are, they’re hidden), though you do get to customize your gender and romantic preferences (relevant because you can get flirty with at least one of the two prime suspects) – success is all down to the perspicacity of your investigation.
Or is it, though? After two playthroughs, my sense is that the game isn’t really structured as a mystery. Sure, you can go interrogate your two friends – one the anarchic class clown, the other a mysterious and cool new kid who’s a multiclassed jock/nerd – and take a variety of conversational tacks, but these choices mostly seem to have an impact on you relationships rather than your ability to solve the mystery. And as is perhaps evident in the lopsided detail with which I characterized the pair of friends, while questioning one of them is an involved process with the potential for myriad different outcomes, the other friend is dispensed with in a conclusory two or three choices. I explored pretty thoroughly in my first playthrough, but I didn’t find my glasses, and though I did in my second, success didn’t feel especially satisfying (Spoiler - click to show)(I decided to take a nap and the glasses had come back while I slept)). I consulted the walkthrough, and it seems like the results of your investigation might depend primarily not on what you say when you encounter your friends, but your skill at finding them: the initial sequence of the game involves you trying to track them down via a variety of means, which feels a bit like an exercise in forcing the player to find the plot.
The writing is charming enough to somewhat carry this disappointing gameplay, though – it’s got a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and though the prose has more than its share of grammar errors and typos, it’s still occasionally charming. I got a laugh out of this description of one of your friends:
"She’s the typical class clown, always with her antics, never taking anything seriously. One time she ordered milk tea for the whole class, even when your school specifically bans outside food."
What a mischievous imp! I do wish the writing had done more to foreground how challenging it is to exist in the world without being able to see well, though; while it gets mentioned from time to time, I’d often forget my predicament since many descriptions don’t seem to be impacted by the main character’s presumably-intense myopia.
Actually, there’s an indication that H!ICFMG may be unfinished; the Comp blurb starts off with “(To be updated)”, and the author’s already uploaded two new versions as of this writing. If that’s the case, a more robust final release may help the game more fully live into its fun premise, but for now it’s more of a teaser.