rendition

by nespresso

Political art experiment
2007

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Number of Reviews: 10
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A monument to poor understanding, March 23, 2021

Till Lindman of Rammstein was once asked why he sang so many dark songs in the first person. His response, to paraphrase, was that if he was to sing about monsters and victims, it wasn't right to force you into that role, so he took it on himself. This is the exact opposite concept, except written like an episode of 24 that had a commercial for the Milgram experiment.

This is a very poor torture simulator. It has no conversational mechanics (even if you use Arabic) gives you no dossier or background other than "we caught him red handed with a suicide vest," and your only option is to hurt the prisoner despite not being able to understand what he's saying. It's the sort of fetishistic view of "interrogation" people get from watching any of the JB characters.

But wait, there's more. Since the author really wants you to hurt this guy, you need to change verbs every three actions, turning the game into simply guessing what pain the author wants you to inflict. And since you have no choice, there's no agency. You can't even feel bad that you made a poor decision because you never had one. It's basically just a snuff story with quess the verb.

Now, this could be missing some great plot twist once you've broken X bones, but after fifteen minutes of trying to talk to the guy, leave the room, or get the information in any rational way, I broke a few toes, got a message that I needed to try something new, then was told it didn't know what a shin was. At that time I had the Spec Ops:The Line moment and said, "screw it, I can walk away." You should, too. It is utterly devoid of intellectual, recreational, or artistic merit.

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