blackberry bloodbath

The first thing that jumps out from this is the fantastic graphics: the online notepad and chat of a teenage girl in the late 90s/2000s. The computer interface is perfect, the colours warm and inviting, but helpfully show the passage of time, and the sidebar icons give different responses when you click on them in different chapters (I didn’t realise this until another reviewer mentioned it, and I replayed). The music on the CD player is a nice extra touch, too.

Each chapter is mostly written in the form of teenage-girl poetry, which sounds real and authentic. Although it’s only a short game, each chapter takes a different event from a different year in the protagonist’s life. When I played it first, it didn’t seem that there were that many branching points, but when I went back and replayed, I realised that there were plenty, and that they take the character off in a number of different directions. A sad, thoughtful, believable and visually appealing tale that does a lot in a short gameplay.