Jump

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Jump is a suicide story. To me, this was clear just from the title and blurb in Comp01, but no matter who you are, you'll know it's a suicide story before game's first prompt, given that it opens with a suicide scene...

There's a bit of window dressing that attempts to explain the suicide, but really, it's just that: window dressing. They're all the sort of movie-of-the-week elements you'd expect: adolescent protagonist; a suicide pact at school; dialogue that's waaay over the top; alcoholism, battering, and probably child molestation in the protagonist's home. These things feel pasted on -- I never had the sense at any point that any of the characters were anything but cardboard cutouts. Details, characterization, and plot are so sparsely provided that it's very difficult to really care about who these people are and what happens to them. It's all overwith rather quickly anyway, so we barely get a chance to meet the characters, much less identify with them.
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