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Review
Very rarely do I find a game where the description of the first room blatently displays the company's website in its room description. This is what I have to work with here.
Your goal is to help Cole figure out his forgotten password. He lost it because he was so excited about his company's new products! (As you should be!)
So you wander the office looking for scraps of paper. (He wrote down the password and shredded it and apparently through the pieces around randomly).
You can talk to many employees (the game takes place at the site of the company who made the game). The employees are excited to tell you about what they're working on, but even the administrator can't get into Cole's file.
Things are under-implemented. One person tells you that the password is likely related to Apple or Steve Jobs. Cole does not respond to either topic, especially irritating since it should be relevant. The map is also fairly huge for such a simple task, as you go from office to office and meet each employee and see what they're working on.
The game seems like credits for another game, and perhaps would have made a fun easter egg in some grander product, but as a stand alone, it couldn't keep my interest long enough. The parchment system it used was very slow, and items were dropped around with no reason (a trombone in an office just sitting there). The game is one puzzle stretched out, though I couldn't bring myself to finish it- which is saying something.
The NPCs are one dimensional. Even Cole, who is at his computer and has forgotten his password wants YOU to enter in the password so you can see the exciting products his company has to offer.
This reminds me of the old NES game MC Kids which was one big McDonalds commercial, but at least that was more fun to play.
Comments on this review
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Just a little correction: as far as I can tell EGC is a university community, not a commercial company. I have no opinion whether it's acceptable or ethical to use IF as an advertisement, but the game's web site doesn't cover the fact: "This game was conceived of and built by the Penn State Educational Gaming Commons to [..] introduce some of the hotter spring 2010 education technologies, such as cloud computing and gesture-aware devices."
Not really an issue ethically, and I know they didn't disguise the fact, but it seems like the "game" is not much at all and the result is more ad than game. There were lots of adware games that were "games" more than ads (like that spot game 7-up made, or avoid the Noid from dominos pizza), where as this seems very light in terms of gameplay.
