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Can't See a Thing Wihout..., January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
With a title like that, and a first screen where your default name is VELMA… you have set some expectations let me tell you. You wake up in Literature Club sans glasses, talk to 3 suspects maybe romance, maybe fight, rinse and repeat to see all the permutations!
Collect-all-the-endings games are relatively new to me. I think I encountered my first last year. That said, in that short year I’ve seen a LOT of them. The ones that work for me are the ones that branch out into bonkers disconnected end states, that startle me with just how far they are willing to diverge. I think they kind of have to? Ok, that’s ridiculous, I don’t make the rules for these things. But if they DON’T they have to justify repetitive gameplay and diminishing returns on comedy text some OTHER way. Generally the shorter the return trip and the sooner the branches become available the better. The deeper the branch point and narrower the divergence, the less it feels justified without some other kind of spice.
I think I need more than what Help! is set up to provide. For one, despite the premise, the lack of clear vision is often DESCRIBED, but does not seem to affect gameplay in any interesting way. Why call me Velma if I can’t grope blindly for a while!!! For another, aside from the choice of what your glasses look like, there is a LOT of linear clicking at the beginning before you get to divergent choice points. Certainly the consequences and plot turns those later choices produce have little connection to the paths you clicked making it essentially a ‘blind binary search simulator,’ where your agency in determining path is effectively zero. This is not unheard of in this genre, but puts all the weight on the endstate. Until you get there, your eyes glaze a lot over repeated text screens. I’m not sure how many loops I did… 8? 10? The endstates I found were unique, but didn’t stray far from each other in particulars or vibe. I found less than half the listed achievements, but I did eventually find my glasses (though achievements did not note this?). After the first pass the sly humor could not hold up, the endstate diversity did not dazzle, and it quickly became a purely Mechanical exercise.
Now that I think about it though, there is a kind of subversive read on this. My repetitive looping, then arbitrary clicking… confusing things all around me I can barely make out let alone navigate… that is kind of a META groping in the dark! Each loop, words flashing past as a barely acknowledged blur. Slapping my hand down with no idea what I’m hitting, how it will play out, just hoping against hope I somehow come up with glasses this time? Maybe this was a better blind search simulator than I gave it credit for! Doesn’t change my score, but I think this read on it is making me just a little happier. We good, Help!, we good.
Played: 11/2/23
Playtime: 30min, score 70/200, 4 achievements, found glasses, no achievement?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, got the gist.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless