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About the StoryHad you known the bloody history of Corona Labs, you would never have signed up as a test subject. But now, plunged into that history, surrounded by the damned and the dying, you must find the truth. Perhaps you will even survive it.Game Details |
Awards
3rd Place overall; 3rd Place, Miss Congeniality Awards - 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2010)
Nominee, Best Game; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Setting; Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle - 2010 XYZZY Awards
Editorial Reviews
IndieGames
One Eye Open is a delightfully graphic piece of Interactive Fiction. An unsettling blend of splatter-fest and mystery, One Eye Open feels familiar. The setting, the circumstances and even the story are all things we've seen before but that doesn't mean the game is any less appealing.
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 7 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews

This is a bad game, but it has so much fun being bad that it is hard not to laugh along with it. Another creatively eviscerated corpse? Sure! Another hallway with teeth that eats people? Keep 'em coming! But I'm glad that this was IF, not a movie, because reading about gruesome scenes is a lot better than watching them.
What is weird about One Eye Open is that it combines splatter horror with a far more serious storyline about a psychic research facility, the tensions between the researchers, and the horrible results of their experiments. Fictionally, the two aspects of the game merge seamlessly; but it is perhaps impossible for the reader to both laugh about the horror and take the underlying story seriously. Every gallon of blood and every cubic foot of pulsating flesh distances us more from the characters. I doubt this was the intended effect, but it certainly is the effect.
Nevertheless, One Eye Open is remarkably ambitious and mostly succeeds. The game is very large (and should have been submitted to the Spring Thing rather than the IF Comp). The story is complicated, interesting, and well thought-out. The puzzles are good, and the best ending can only be reached once the player has thoroughly understood what happened in the past and what will happen in the future. Care and attention have been lavished onto the environment. I wouldn't quite call it a must-play game, but it is certainly enjoyable and well worth perusing. I personally prefer it to Babel, which is the game that obviously inspired One Eye Open.
My main complaint, apart from the weird mix of genres, is that the story is mostly told through journal entries and other documents. Journals are the disease of interactive fiction. Using journal entries is almost always the easy way out, and almost never a compelling way of telling a story. In addition, it obviously makes no sense that all these secretive protagonists are writing down their most inward thoughts. People don't act that way. Please, IF writers across the world, stop using notes and journals and sundry scraps of paper as the means by which you deliver your story to me?
But hey, cleaning the suit? The solution to that puzzle was so over-the-top and yet so sensible that I laughed out loud.

The similarities with Babel are legion. In both games, you play the subject of nefarious mind- and body-altering experiments performed upon you by uncaring corporate overlords. You're alone in a research facility in the aftermath of those failed experiments. You gather up the history of the experiments and the facility, piece by piece, (Spoiler - click to show)often by touching objects (although Babel's methodology for this is more organically tied to the story). In both games, you (Spoiler - click to show)fashion an antidote -- tragically never completed by the experimenters -- and have to safely enter a tainted airlocked lab in the northeast corner of the facility. So things may seem awfully familiar.
The primary difference is in tone. Babel is a science fiction/mystery story, with an emphasis on uncovering the truth of what happened at the station. One Eye Open is a horror story. There's a mystery here, but what you really need to know is: the experiment is really, really bad. Your job is to undo it as completely as possible.
There's no build up to the horror. It's all right there in front of you, almost from the first move, which runs counter to the usual horror imperatives of suspense and dread. What it lacks in those areas, though, One Eye Open makes up for in ickiness. The style is early David Cronenberg with the gore turned way up: meat and organs and orifices everywhere, pulsating behind everyday objects. It's agreeably revolting.
The game is a bit too long for the Comp. After two hours, most players will not have completed it (or at least they won't have gotten a good ending, I don't think), and the story is slow to unravel. When it finally does, though, it is very compelling. It's a testament to the storytelling skills of the authors that I persisted long past the judging to get a pretty good ending, and then finally found the best ending days later. Like with certain Cronenberg pictures (I'm thinking here of Videodrome or eXistenZ), I'm not entirely sure what it was I just saw, but I know that I couldn't take my eyes off it.
The coding was mostly solid, with a few minor bugs and annoyances. I wrestled with the parser to get past a certain locked door, had trouble (Spoiler - click to show)putting a vaccine in a syringe, and found myself stymied by files in cabinets. There were some walls of text that could perhaps have been trimmed down as well. But these are insignificant issues that can easily be addressed in a post-Comp release. Familiar as it was, One Eye Open stuck with me, long after Babel did.

In the end I played to the first ending, and then tinkered a bit to find some others but gave up. One reason for this was the feeling of having seen the genre too many times, others were some annoying disambiguation problems. If I mention the file cabinets and desks, I think people get what I mean.
This review might sound a bit too negative, since I did enjoy the first playthrough. For someone with a different gaming background this could be a four star game, easily.
See All 7 Member Reviews
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Recommended Lists
One Eye Open appears in the following Recommended Lists:Games that I couldn't put down by MathBrush
These are games that for some reason or over I just couldn't stop playing and thinking about. There are no specific reasons given. These aren't necessarily my favorite games; one reason they are pageturner is that the pacing is good and...
Favorite Horror Games by thecanvasrose
The horror IF that I most love and enjoy! (I generally prefer narrative over puzzles and scare-factor over narrative.) Ranked from least to most favorite. For a list of other horror games with good ratings, see my other horror games...
Medical games by MathBrush
These are games that have a medical theme of some sort, including medical simulators, medical horror, and games featuring doctors. Feel free to suggest others! (Items 8-15 suggested by David Welbourn)
Polls
The following polls include votes for One Eye Open:Games with amusing deaths by Andrew Schultz
Lots of games have one amusing death, but what games best take the concept and run with it? These deaths could be nudges on messing something up, or even better, or even a nice reward for a reader who is playing attention and notices a...
Games with great puzzles by Molly
Games that have great puzzle-design. The puzzles need to be logical and internally consistent.
im looking for a good horror game by nick love
I'm looking for something with a creepy environment. It also has to be very challenging.
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