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Review
A two star rating? Ahhuhhhh.. no, I really don't think so..
This game was a nice surprise for me because I'm a fan of untangled sequencing and writers with the discipline to also be effective editors. The stylistic methods I recognized were employed well, from a structural standpoint this is a very tidy project, obviously exploiting use of the reader's capacity for imagination with the conservative descriptions. Pace, suspense and atmosphere are three concepts this game conveys particularly well and the bare writing emphasizes their importance. Overall an intelligent and deliberate project concentrated into something short, sweet and significant in spite of how few materials it required to construct.
I like this. I appreciate what the text choses not to say which isn't something I often get to enjoy. I've looked at a couple of other pieces of your work and the quality seems pretty promising, so hopefully you'll share some other projects in the future with us!
Comments on this review
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There is a reason why I gave this game a 2 stars. To be honest, if IFDB had a 'over 10' rating, the game would have received a 5/10 from me. I'm sure that it is fair enough judging from how it plays.
You mentioned suspense and atmosphere. Just to inform you, I'm sure I can understand how suspenseful is suspenseful, and how atmospheric is atmospheric (not sure if I make sense here, haha). Compared to anything else that I've played (Anchorhead, King of Shreds and Patches), this game doesn't show much of it. This is probably how it is written, in a more poetic form. I just don't feel as though something is stalking me and the house just seems a little lackluster. The writing doesn't give much life to the house and just acknowledges the fact that there is a parlour and dining room in it.
Bare prose helps this game to be minimalistic, but it doesn't convey much significant horror elements, although it is trying to. To make a broad story, you will need words, and there aren't much here. I see a very slow pace here, which is what it is accomplishes in, but honestly, it is much too slow for my liking. Horror tends to work better in a slow manner, but in this case, speed is indeed neccessary. Something too passive will lose its effectiveness and interest towards the player.
The blurb on the game page is 'You have to look'. But what exactly do we accomplish when we look? We get nothing. The entire house is empty. So the main point of this game? To explain that ghosts do not exist and that it's just our imagination, or better, the wind. Honestly, there's no big deal with what the PC is trying to do. Why does the PC even bothers to explore? It's just the wind. my friend!
I believe that there is a type of horror used by one special man in the past that emphasizes the unknown. That one person is trying so hard to discover something disturbing that he encounters, but fails to find something physical. He or she only finds the traces of what that unknown being is (some guy left insane in his house?; somebody killed and left to rot in their house?). Perhaps this what 'creak, creak' is trying to accomplish, but we find no traces at all. Only sounds and a 'presence' that isn't even proven to be the doings of an entity or being.
I generally find this game OK and succeeds in its goal to unsettle players. The author does indeed have the potential to crank up better games in the future. But just remember to analyse the concept of your project closely to improvise and improve it.
Thanks for reading.
