Coloratura

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5 star: (62) 4 star: (33) 3 star: (9) 2 star: (0) 1 star: (0)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 7 Write a review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

A mid-length sci-fi game from an alien perspective, February 3, 2016

Coloratura is one of the greatest sci-fi IF of all time. In this game, you play as a being utterly different from us that encounters a situation it has never experienced before.

The game has all of the usual commands, plus some new commands, the most interesting of which are color-based commands. Different colors signify different moods or ideas.

The puzzles are extremely rewarding, and fit into the plot exactly. The NPC's are well-implemented, and the nature of the game makes you feel as if the parser is not limiting conversation at all, only the world itself is.

I didn't really need a map for this game. It took a couple of hours to play. The game's biggest strength is its ability to put you in the shoes of someone completely different from you, to make you really feel like you are them.

I only wish the game had lasted a bit longer. But this may have made the puzzles less cohesive.

An excellent science fiction game, September 22, 2020

Coloratura is an excellent science fiction game.

In a sense, the game gives you two stories in one. Foregrounded is the story of the alien PC, who drives most of the events in Coloratura. But the humans on board the ship experience the alien's actions very differently, and therein lies the second story. The way that Coloratura allows you to experience these two stories simultaneously is, well, brilliant.

I have mixed feelings about the puzzles in Coloratura, though. The puzzles are fairly easy, but that's not because the solutions to the problems you face are naturally apparent. In fact, these solutions are generally not actions that would easily come to mind at all. However, the puzzles are made easy by the game repeatedly hinting at what you should do next. I find that off-putting with puzzles, and it affected my enjoyment of the game.

To be fair, though, there's a quite difficult design problem to be solved here: A game with an alien PC is going to be played by humans who have no good intuitive sense of the actions that alien PC is easily capable of taking. To avoid a game with an "other" PC being unfairly difficult, then, such a game has to slowly teach the PC's abilities to the player. Coloratura does this some - but, in my opinion, not enough.

Still, this is a relatively minor point. Coloratura is a great game, and its greatness lies in the tension it creates between the story of the alien - who wants something basic, understandable, and just - and the story of the humans who experience the consequences of the alien's actions as horrific.

I have waited forever for a game like this, May 9, 2019

While I agree with the bulk of the reviews already singing (see what I did there?) the praises of this game, I still feel compelled to add further acclaim for the great attention to the parser. I found run-ins with default "don't know that verb" error messages to be surprisingly uncommon. This game does a great job of telling what is essentially a horror story from a non-horror perspective, making a somewhat "The Thing"-esque alien antagonist relatable and sympathetic. If you, like me, have ever wanted to play some sort of pacifist psychic ooze from the depths of the ocean - well, I'm surprised there was more than one person who wanted that, but you should absolutely play this. (Spoiler - click to show)That the author of the game even intuited that you might want to reclaim the lost little piece of your body in the science lab, and lets you do so, was, despite being a tiny touch, a moment that won my admiration.

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