De Baron

by Victor Gijsbers profile

Fantasy
2006

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Number of Reviews: 19
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Some Ideas, Weak Story, February 10, 2010
by Brian Conn (Eureka, California)

Most of my reactions have already been expressed by previous reviewers, but I wanted to add this: Although the game may or may not work as a psychology test or an exploration of morality, it fails as a story. The exposition is good, and some of the early description drew me in, but as I went on my feeling of being an actor in a fictional world started to fade. By the end I had no sense of urgency; I was making choices as I'd make choices on a psychology test, without any notion that they'd affect characters I cared about.

The problem was illustrated most clearly for me in the last scene, in which the protagonist, who has been repeatedly committing an evil act, is offered the choice of committing that act again or doing something else. The character presumably is driven to commit the act (he's been doing it for a while), but as the player I had no such compulsion. So the game for me went approximately like this:

Game: You are caught in a possibly unbreakable cycle of evil! Do you break it?

Me: y

Game: OK.

If the game had developed its world more thoroughly and made me identify more deeply with the character, that scene would have been troubling to say the least. As it was I just felt like I was pressing buttons.

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