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Review
This game made a notable splash upon its debut, taking 3rd place in IFComp 2008 and garnering high profile reviews by top author Emily Short. It's a very short, very light puzzler in form, with its most outstanding features being its writing and illustrations.
As noted by Short, the writing style is reminiscent of that of Robb Sherwin, though it seems considerably less colorful on the whole. It echoes a style that was popular in the 1990s and is aptly described by MathBrush as "grungy." The protagonists are slackers in all their glory. The game's writing is economical and engaging, adding color to the visually-established scenes and weaving thumbnail sketches of the characters' personalities with admirable aplomb.
It's the illustrations, which are of professional quality, that make this game stand out more than anything. A picture's worth a thousand words, and the in situ character portraits convey copious details of scene and characterization in milliseconds. The character portraits are the backstop of the writing, which would seem too spare to pass muster without this support, and I admire the author's expert use of text and images to complementary effect.
The afterlife sequences are also illustrated, and, in fact, are only illustrated. The pictures themselves are opaque, but the image-only presentation feels like something different -- cf. the Gent Stickman series, or "reading" a child's picture book. I think this was a first for the form, and it is probably a significant part of what fueled admiration for the work.
In her contemporary review at playthisthing.com, Emily Short states: "IF needs to explore ways to change registers in order to achieve its full potential as a medium." This work is undoubtedly an experiment in doing so, and I believe that it points in some interesting directions, but the work itself seems to lack any real staying power as its star has faded considerably over time. The likely culprit here is that substance is entirely inferior to style: profanity for profanity's sake, scatological elements intended to provoke an easy reaction from the audience, a forced inciting event featuring an utterly irrational (and thereby utterly unbelievable) bad guy, an unexpected and entirely unexplained "mystical" framing that is accepted without comment or curiosity by the PCs, and a simplistic resolution which offers a fairy tale ending that clashes deeply with the doggedly gritty setting.
I'm happy to give three stars to any game that accomplishes what it sets out to do, but in this case it's not clear what the author was trying to achieve. It wasn't exactly enjoyable and when stripped of decoration it is a substandard story, so I'm settling on two. I'd still recommend this game as an object of study, and I think there is more to be done with its highly visual style, but if you're just in it for fun you might prefer Guilded Youth by the same author.
