She's Actual Size

by Jake Eakle

Episode 3 of Apollo 18 Tribute Album
2012
Surreal
Inform 7


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Review

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Chrono Love-Slaves of the 50-Foot Woman, March 28, 2012

A strikingly surreal piece, with the feel of a (feminist?) short story written in the 1960s or 70s, or certainly in a time when people took Freud way too seriously. Unfortunately, version 1 is crippled by some major bugs.

The game has two PCs; one, Paul, obsesses over Lisa and in doing so distorts her reality. While the content is technically PG, Paul's obsession is in a pretty fetishy idiom, and the story as a whole is one of those works (see also Portal, maybe make some change, Loved) that plays heavily on creepy compulsion and manipulation of the player. For the most part, you have very limited options and the game makes it extremely clear what they are. There is one rather odd puzzle, which is less complicated than it looks (which means that it can be solved without being fully understood.)

As of version 1, there's an annoyingly repeating run-time bug (attempt to look up a non-existent correspondence in Table 1) in the second scene, although I can't tell if it breaks anything critical. More seriously, I was unable to finish She's Actual Size due to a major bug later on that failed to switch between protagonists at the appropriate moment. This is a shame, because it's a fascinatingly weird beast.

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Kevin Jackson-Mead, March 28, 2012 - Reply
The game is now at version 5, and the online version and the version in the downloadable zip file are both up to date.
Andrew Schultz, April 15, 2012 - Reply
Update 5 has definitely fixed a lot of the bigger bugs. So thanks for noting the it and keeping the games updated!

I'd say that I had a bear of a time figuring out how (Spoiler - click to show)when you cleaned what in your room affected the deaths at the same time, and it wasn't terribly well-hinted. When I thought one thing affected another and imagined how things were hinted, it turned out I was wrong, so I was left with semi-intelligent guesswork through about 1680 different possibilities.

I got there, and it made for an interesting story, but I'd love to see better cluing or even (Spoiler - click to show)a summary of how you cleaned your room at the end, maybe with a hint or two about how things could've changed.
Sam Kabo Ashwell, March 28, 2012 - Reply
Thanks; will check it out and update the review accordingly.
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