The Urge

You are a serial killer, with his (his? It’s not entirely clear) next ‘guest’.

The Urge is by turns gory and mundane, but largely linear. It is more a character study than an interactive story. It takes us through what the author imagines to be the everyday life of a serial killer, (Spoiler - click to show)juxtaposing the PC’s uncontrollable bloodlust with mundane activities like cleaning up and going grocery shopping.

What graphics included in the game are well-rendered and attractive, but the formatting of the text had several slips, including missing punctuation marks and inconsistent line breaks.

The story could also have taken some interesting turns - letting the reader decide the PC’s motivation, for example, or the extent to which the PC will go. Instead, the linear storyline reads like lots of other serial-killer TV serials, with little nuance or, indeed, anything to invest the reader in the PC. Maybe this was a reflection of the unstoppable nature of the titular urge to kill. Maybe it was unintentional. But it felt like clicking through a story, and not a very engaging one, at that.

Overall, I felt the graphics looked good and were used thoughtfully, but the story was rather lacking, which is a pity!

Welp, I'm a serial killer with my latest victim.

I have an interest in serial killers, but I’m not a big fan of graphic gore.So this game hits a good spot for me.

The first scene is of the protagonist torturing their victim. There are ‘funny’ tortures you can use as an alternative to gory ones. These strike a weird note that’s not quite funny enough. There’s none of this sort of humour in the rest of the game so I can only imagine it’s here for the squeamish players.

There is a point where if you run a red light you end up in prison. I played the other branch where you wait for the light, and enter a romantic storyline. I didn't replay to explore the prison story line.

The rest of the game is a sort of slice of life as the killer falls in love, dates a person they don’t want to murder, and they move in together. It’s kind of ordinary. The observation about putting aside your own interests and hobbies a bit when you’re part of a relationship is well-trodden ground already. Contrasting the killer’s wildly unorthodox murders with the commonplace activities of work, cooking and coupledom is slightly interesting but isn’t developed.

Unfortunately there’s no strong punchy point the game wants to make. It gets full playthrough from me because I like serial killer stories. There’s only two points where you can make a meaningful choices, which is disappointing. The author is telling me a story, but sadly not a story that engages me.

The text effects are decent and spooked me out once – where a description of a potential victim is suddenly interspersed with KILL CHOP MURDER in red letters.

I like that the characters are all non-gender-specific.

This is perhaps paperblurts most compelling story for me, but also the most troublesome content. You play a serial killer who just can't get enough of killing.

The pacing, the graphics and animations, are all excellent, although it drags on to six acts.

It goes into detail about the gore, but it's over the top, silly gore.

The story gets interesting with the addition of a couple of major npc's. Both of them get wrapped up in a somewhat rushed way. Also there is no save feature for this long game with many slow pauses.