Virtuality

The best part of the game is the fun riff it has with casual gaming themes like achievements, meters and bars for all sorts of things. There are great jokes here. I recommend playing the game for a half dozen turns and just look at the status bar.

The game itself is difficult in unsatisfying ways: it's often thinly implemented and it requires arbitrarily trying out commands from a long list of possible commands. Despite it being an escape-the-room game, the set up fails to give any particular motivation or direction for doing so.

The only npc exists only to annoy you, in which it is fairly successful, and what with its constant jabbering and the swarm of useless info on the status bar and humongous text dumps all over the place, the game feels very claustrophobic and cluttered. Which you'd think would be good for an escape-the-room game, but as the whole thing is so unmotivated, the clutter doesn't serve any narrative or thematic purpose. It's just sort of painful.

That all said, the creative use of the status bar throughout is inspired, and it's possible that there's a compelling game underneath all the clutter. Maybe it would appeal more to those well steeped in the conventions of escape-the-room games.