DOL-OS

DOL-OS is less a choice-based game and more a hypertext exploration game—or more specifically, a “found document” game, with the documents consisting of computer programs, web browser history, images, music, text files, log entries, etc. Being given this trove to explore was compelling, even as at first I was very confused about what all the things I was reading/seeing had to do with each other.

The lovely UI does a lot to create immersion—it’s a great faux computer interface, complete with a green CRT emulation, a variety of icons, and different looks for different programs. The pacing is handled well, with puzzles gating the content you’re meant to see later, meaning the tension slowly escalates as you learn more specifics about who this computer belonged to and what they were working on. There’s one point at which it’s clear you’re getting to the meat of the game, and pieces of what you’ve seen earlier start connecting, until finally you have the full story—and the full horror of it. And there’s still one more twist after that…

(Spoiler - click to show)The moment where you realize that the AI is still present, and you can interact with it, was a great one—perfectly chilling after all you now know. The conversation with it was a little bit of a let down to me, though. Here you get a list of questions you can ask, which you can lawnmower through---picking one doesn't lock you out of any others. However, some of those options lead to sub-menus of questions, and typically you can only ask one of those before you’re shunted back to the main menu. I didn’t see any in-game reason for this, and would have liked to be able to ask all the sub-questions. There’s also, as wolfbiter's review points out, the fact that you don’t get to pick every piece of dialogue from the PC—some back-and-forth happens without your input, which was a little jarring because up until that point, there hadn't really *been* a PC, just me, the player. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when given the choice at the end, I didn’t see any reason why I’d want to save the program—the game certainly gave me no evidence it was at all a good thing!

I liked that most of the links are keybound—i.e., there’s a little number next to each, showing that you can press that number on the keyboard to open that link. But there were a few hiccups with this system; not every clickable option on each screen is keybound, on one screen there’s a “10” option instead of a 0, and some parts of the game simply can’t be played via the keyboard. I also discovered only after completing the game that there are in-game hints accessible only from the keybinding menu—not sure if I missed something at the beginning indicating they were there? Finally, I don’t want to be a dick about translated games, but the text could use a final proofreading pass to clean up typos and errant phrasing.

Despite my quibbles, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game; it was fun to progress, solving the small puzzles to unlock more text and finally learn the answer to the mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)And a game about the perils of trusting in AI too much feels very timely…