The Disappearance of Karen Ward

This game had a lot of interesting components that just didn't add up. It consists of a number of longish pages of text peppered with links to other pages; the links on any given page always lead the same place (as far as I could tell). After a while it started feeling like a maze, which I found an interesting idea-- but not one I managed to solve.

The story, too, was interesting: exploring the history of a young woman who fell out of a window. It's supernatural and creepy and interesting-- but it's just a little too much information presented in a very dry way to really get invested in. I skimmed.

And the voice, finally, was interesting: dry, matter of fact, disinterested, almost scholarly. Omniscient, too: I was getting information from each click but there were no eyes attached to that information. I wanted to know more about how it worked, but I couldn't find the key to the maze, maybe because the long passages of hyperlink-studded text was hard to process and the voice made it even harder to engage.

The main problem with this work is that neither the story nor the writing is very compelling. This is a big issue because it requires the reader keep clicking on links to find one which will advance the story. The characters, the story, and the prose were banal. I was overloaded with a lot of information that, by and large, I couldn't care less about. If it had been written in first person from the perspective of the detective, it might have been interesting enough for me to finish it rather than frustrating and dull.