9:05

A quick little game (Spoiler - click to show), with nudge to replay after the ending.

Because of my play style of b-lining to the end (Spoiler - click to show)on first play and this leaned into that for a twist:clap:

first, we need to look at 9:05 from the perspective of when it was created. certainly, there had been stories that concealed crucial facts from the player as a part of their structure, ranging from the clever (Photopia) to the merely frustrating (The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). but the standard expectation of the time was that you could trust what the parser told you implicitly and assume you knew everything you needed to about the protagonist (most often there simply not being anything worth knowing).

a game like 9:05 challenges these impressions. the parser and protagonist are (Spoiler - click to show)telling a lie of omission. this is, obviously, a Generic Protagonist just going through the dreary opening moves of a typical slice-of-life game. (Spoiler - click to show)no, it isn't. you're not the Generic Protagonist, you're the person who robbed and murdered them.

9:05 is a very brief game that only rewards a handful of playthroughs before being completely explored. but those playthroughs have something very important to say about the nature of IF.

while i wouldn't exactly call a game that can be finished in three minutes and completely exhausted in ten a masterpiece, this is definitely an important work that signposted some of the narrative techniques used in many later games.

9:05 is a game with a deceptively simple premise: You're asleep. The phone rings, waking you up. It's time to get cleaned up and go, and fast.

A single play-through is very short, so it's a breeze to reach the game's multiple endings (there are at least four).

There are some rough edges (the parser responds oddly sometimes when it doesn't understand the player's commands), but these issues didn't get in the way of my good time.

9:05 is well-written, with some amusing twists. Start the game with realistic expectations - it's not some masterpiece of literature, it's a funny little text game. By those standards, I consider it well worth playing a few times to see what it has to offer.

I don't get why this game gets such high ratings.

First play: Figure out the twist... it's a trick. There's information you as the player don't have, but if you really were the protagonist you would know this! Is there an explanation for why you don't know this? Does the PC have amnesia or something? Nope. Not that I know of. This doesn't feel like an "awesome" twist to me. It just feels like the author is cheating.

Second play: Immediately beat the game. Wait, that was it? So unsatisfying.

Third play: Scan some walkthroughs first because there must be more to this highly rated game, right? Not much more... yeah, there are some clues that you *could* have found the first time, but nothing that justifies the rating this game gets.

If I hadn't seen so many positive reviews, I probably wouldn't have minded so much... but the fall from those high expectations was rough!

A short game about getting up in the morning and going to work, but with a twist ending. Plays with your expectations - there are some assumptions you make when you play a parser-based game, and it didn't really occur to me to question them here. Ironically enough, (Spoiler - click to show)when I got to the bit where you leave the house without locking it, I wondered if someone might break in when I was out at work.

If I hadn't been in such as hurry to get to work, I might have done what I normally do in parser games and (Spoiler - click to show)examine everything - in particular, to look under things and behind things. Of course, I did that on the replay.

One bit left me trying to guess a verb: (Spoiler - click to show)"get in cubicle" did the trick.

If I had to give someone a short game to play in order to teach them how to play a parser game, it'd probably be this.

My nephew and I were amused by this bare-bones vignette in which every turn another minute passes and we're already late and the phone is ringing and ...

We enjoyed the ambiguity of the game and we kept trying to guess the genre. Is it a puzzle to finish the tasks before the time runs out? A Groundhog Day game? A pointed criticism of the banality of corporate cubicle lifetyle? Clearly something was going to happen at some point.

In the end it was amusing but we were annoyed by the sharp edges of the railroaded short story format. Neither of us felt the ends justified the journey, even on a few replays.