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Pretty horrible, but a bit too repetitive, November 20, 2015By now everyone know what Taghairm is about, right? I liked the game, and my experience was a bit different from other people, so I might as well talk about my experience.
First of all I had no idea this kind of thing existed, and it is SO messed up. For some reason I really like (Spoiler - click to show)messed-up, creepy, horrific Middle-Ages beliefs (changelings are another good one), so this was really interesting and neat! The sound atmosphere is really cool too, and adds a lot to the experience.
The game is very repetitive mechanically, and you (Spoiler - click to show)burn cat upon cat upon cat. But I felt like the horror you feel the first time starts to diminish after a few, and then is worn off by the end; I very quickly entered a pattern where I'd click almost rythmically on the links, barely pausing to read. This might be on purpose, and (maybe I'm thinking too much) may be meant as commentary on mechanized evil, and how easy it is to remove yourself emotionally from actions when they become repetitive. But if that was the purpose, I'm not sure it came across very well: basically my reaction was "ugh (Spoiler - click to show)I'm killing cats... why am I killing cats? I guess this will make sense later? Ok, I'll keep going, humor the game to see what it has to say in the end" - and then it was just about following whatever motions the game would make me follow.
By the end it's like I didn't believe the game anymore, I think I felt very removed, in a very conscious way, from the game. The voices near the end and the thunderstorm made some of the creepiness come back for me, but I wish it hadn't gone; I wish the game had been either more concise and more focused, or with more variety.
In particular, another thing that removed me from the game was that I quickly figured out that the game generated cat descriptions at random - if the game can keep generating interchangeable cats, why should I care about them? They're just 0s and 1s. If the description had more, sorry, fluff to them ("the scared cat is looking at you with big eyes", "the half-dead cat is twitching and his eyes meet yours", "the angry cat scratches you which wakes you up a little"), I might have cared a bit more; or if there was an actual direction to them, I'd have tried to see what the next cat showed me about the world or myself or my state; or if the intensity was heightened or the game kept going further. (If that makes sense?)
As is, I felt like the game heightened things by small amounts that had too much space in between them; I wish the moments where things changed had been bigger (big changes, big punches to the gut, new sounds, screen gets smokier, etc) or that the space between them had been shorter. Other than that, it's creepy, well-done, with nice sound effects, and a nice Halloween game - if you want to provoke very loud reactions in a group of friends.