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Number of Ratings: 408
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10 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful but sometimes tedius. , May 18, 2010Shade is one of those games that is hard to discuss without spoilers. It's a one room game. The game includes your bathroom, kitchen, and apartment proper.
Now at first I thought it was going to be pretty boring, with the sparsely decorated apartment being done a million times before, but the writing is so great it really put me back in my days after college. The little details make the game come alive- the old 386 computer, the pile of papers that represent your life's work of writing that you don't even thing are worth looking through, the shower that isn't working...
Then we come to the game itself, which really rewards you for sticking with it. Your key to the game comes in the form of your to-do list, which changes as you accomplish things on it. (It might not change- just your focus seems to change). As you start mucking about your apartment, little subtle clues are given, though it might not seem relavent at the time- the game deserves a second playthrough.
Finally, the issue becomes distorted, as you realize (Spoiler - click to show) you are in a dream , as things start going awry in your apartment (Spoiler - click to show) as everything starts turning into sand . The writing gets excellent at this point, as you try to figure out what's going on, and finally the realization hits you.
It's definately a mind game, much like the movie Identity or Fight Club.
But the gameplay- it's not really puzzle based, it's go no NPCs to speak of. It's exploratory if anything. You're basically moving through the plot, which makes the game linear, and sometimes difficult, since you aren't always sure what you need to do next. There is no onboard hint system, except checking your to-do list, and that can be very vague at times. Still, you can't get permanently stuck, just frustrated as your key actions seem to be looking at and messing with the mundane issues in your apartment, such as the sink or shower.
This is the game's big shortfall, as the actions are arbitarty. Sometimes sitting on the futon triggers something, sometimes it doesn't. That can get pretty frustrating, but the positives of the game outweigh the negatives, if you're in to the mindscrew type games.
There is one part of the game (Spoiler - click to show) where the helicopter flies by that I wish was more interactive. Once you find out what's going on, it implies that (Spoiler - click to show) the helicoptor may represent your rescuers and it would be nice if you could signal the helicoptor for a different ending. That might wreck the appeal of the game, especially if you accidentially do it on the first playthrough, but it would be nice.
- Christopher Bogs, April 21, 2010
5 of
33 people found the following review helpful:
The only way to win is not to play this!, April 20, 2010(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)While not even close to being the worst game of all time (All roads is cemented in this honorable position for all eternity), Shade will for me always be a beacon of hatred for all that is so wrong with the Interactive Fiction scene, what is so obviously stinking to high heaven but accepted and hailed by the majority.
Short description of the "plot" (it's offensive to the English language itself to use this word in relation to this "game"!): Man (devoid of character, naturally) needs to sort through the bedlam of his apartment in order to find his plane tickets and other junk needed for a vacation trip to the desert.
So far, so good. 5 minutes of "fun" with the room description.
Everything literally falls apart once you have found the (then completely unimportant) tickets. Literally.
Everything turns to, of all things, SAND. Because there is sand in the desert! And that's where nameless nobody #1 wanted to go!
Smart thinking on Plotkin's side, ain't it? Surely needed a lot of research... I mean it's so CLEVER it hurts my brain...
Even though there is no variation in the ever-annoying sand transformation NO JUTSU, it's yet extremely hard to advance at some points. Which includes bugs and unlogical syntax, needless to say. Just look at things often enough and the game will advance eventually... if you're lucky.
So what is the main flaw of this shaggy dog joke that is a complete and utter waste of time: It means NOTHING.
Sand! goddamn it, it could be cotton candy and nothing would be different in any way!
In fact the whole purpose of this game is stated by the author in the sarcastic and pretentious as hell "The only way to win is not to play!" quote. I will draw a lesson from this, and never play another Andrew Plotkin game again.
I encourage everybody with half a brain in his head to do the same.
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vote NO, I could honestly not care any less. the fools liking this turd are all brain-dead slaves to meaninglessness anyway
- Azazel, April 2, 2010
- TanRu, March 13, 2010
- A. Margo (Southern California), March 12, 2010
- Danny Huss, March 12, 2010
- omenofdoom, March 6, 2010
- Danielle (The Wild West), March 3, 2010
- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), February 15, 2010
- Pinstripe (Chicago, Illinois), February 7, 2010
- Ioannis D., February 6, 2010
- loungeman (Bilbao, Spain), January 4, 2010
- Ken Hubbard (Ohio), December 23, 2009
- Grey (Italy), December 21, 2009
19 of
22 people found the following review helpful:
Lost In The Dark, December 15, 2009Shade is a one-room puzzle game, but what a room it is! Technically, this game is very accomplished. The room feels large and cramped at the same time. While there are no other real locations to go to in the game, the room has distinct areas that you can enter or exit but which don’t really impact the scope of your actions. What I mean by this is that you can enter the ‘kitchen’ area of the room, and the status bar will even reflect that, but if you then type ‘sit at desk’ (which is in the living room) the game will seamlessly make you leave the kitchen area then sit at the desk without complaint.
So it feels like one room but actually has distinct areas that you can look at and interact with, which makes it much easier on the player when he/she is trying to examine everything in the room trying to figure out what to do next, which, unfortunately, is something I was doing quite frequently in this game.
For all its technical achievements (which I admit all Plotkin games excel in – technical fluency), I simply wasn’t interested in much of the game.
The story starts out simple enough: You are going on a trip on an early flight and haven’t been able to get much sleep when suddenly you realize you can’t remember where you put your tickets. We’ve all been there before, and the charming familiarity of the scenario definitely piqued my interest at first. But then, as the game progresses, your room starts to lose a bit of its solidity. The descriptions of objects change almost randomly, and slowly the game descends into dream-logic.
There is a problem with dream logic in games: it changes the rules. While it can be fun to read a book where a character watches his sofa turn into a thousand snakes and then slither off, and halfway fun to watch it unfold in a movie or TV show, in a video game it means every gameplay mechanic up until the leap into dreamtime falls into question and the player is left in a lurch not sure what to do anymore.
I feel Shade fell into this problem and there came to a point in the game where I was doing things simply because the game wanted me to and not because I understood the reasoning behind them. Obviously since it was following dream-logic by that point, there was no reason behind it, but that was not very satisfying.
In the end, I sort of figured out what was going on, and the cause of the delirium the player stumbles into, but it’s never entirely stated that my supposition is correct, only vaguely gestured at. Personally, I like to see closure in a game, even if it is not a victory condition for the PC, and the strange happenings, and unclear ending of Shade didn’t work for me.
- Nicholas, December 5, 2009
0 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful psychological horror, November 30, 2009I am a great fan of stories intended to make you paranoid. This game acomplished this task rather well. The "ending" could have been better, but it still made me stop and think. Some people may find this repetetive, but I was pushed frorward by the desire to see the ending. This demonstrates how suspenseful the game was. I personally loved this game. Some people, however, may not find it to their liking. Try at least the first fifteen minutes. It'll help you decide if it is a game you would enjoy.
- Dannii (Australia), November 12, 2009
3 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
I would give this a 3.5 star rating , October 24, 2009Shade is gripping, creepy, and creative.
However, it gets repetitive after a while. To an extent, this helps build up the suspenseful environment because the actions that you performed a few turns ago don't work anymore. Everything goes more and more wrong... but I feel like the game could have been trimmed down a little in this respect.
I also found that the ending was a little bit anti-climatic. It was almost like the author was trying too hard to be profound and it ultimately became meaningless.
- tigersfan (Durham, NC), October 8, 2009
- lupusrex (Seattle, WA), October 4, 2009
- Pepisolo, September 30, 2009
- GDL (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), September 25, 2009
- Mike Ciul (Philadelphia), September 3, 2009
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