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Review
This author knows how to pull at your heartstrings. Once again they use technology and online communities as the backdrop for a very personal and emotional story.
In this game you play a moderator for an online community called HiveKind, tasked with finding and deleting accounts that belong to deceased users. The server AI flags accounts that it thinks might belong to someone who has died and unlocks all their messages for you to read to determine if you agree with that assessment. That's where the core story comes into this game. Reading through those private messages, (Spoiler - click to show)that occur both before and after the account user is killed by a drunk driver, is what delivers both the back story and emotional impact.
The game doesn't really have many choices in it, though one I'm interested to hear about from others who played the game is whether they read the messages in chronological or reverse chronological order in their role as account investigator. The few choices come in at another heart-wrenching part: having to message the closest contacts of the user to get confirmation on whether they are deceased or not. How blunt are you with them about the task at hand? How much are you willing to try to bend the rules?
This game makes heavy use of timed-text. Usually I'm not a fan of it, in this game it was a mixed bag. Generally I thought it worked out okay on the first playthrough (though I encountered several times where I wasn't given enough time to read the messages I was sending to the group, but I got the gist). However, playing through a second time I wished there had been a way to turn it off so I could more easily see how different choices would affect the story. That would be another thing that missed the mark for me a bit: (Spoiler - click to show)on my second playthrough I didn't feel like making a different choice affected anything. The ending was exactly the same and given how different your tone is in the group chat I was hoping for different reactions from the friends of the deceased.
Overall though a game well worth your time.
