A Conversation in a Dark Room

A Conversation in a Dark Room

This is an author's first game, but is well-polished and has multiple endings and engaging dialogue.

You play as a man hired to be involved in a death. You meet a man in a dark bar late at night, and the two of you have an in-depth conversation. You are a reporter, but it's not clear that you'll be doing any reporting tonight. This seems more intimate. Your counterpart is old and wealthy, very wealthy in fact.

The story is split into three chapters, two of which are in the same location. Mechanically, you have three different stats that you can increase, which the game helpfully clarifies with some about text early on and popups when a stat goes up. Depending on your stats, you can get one of five different endings.

I think this is a promising start and that this author has hurdled over many of the mistakes new authors make.

There were a couple of things that would have enhanced or changed my experience.

While I just recently posted a review praising a different game for slow text, which I usually detest, my experience with this game was a return to form. On chapter titles and a few other select screens, text is spooled out painfully slowly. There are usually two reasons, I suspect, that people use slow text:

One, they want to control the experience of the reader by emphasizing important lines or moments. Many times I believe this is due to a lack of confidence in the power of static organization. Paragraph breaks, fonts, font size, and page breaks naturally provide a pacing for text that has been used effectively for thousands of years (like the elaborate capitals in illustrated manuscripts). At times, slowing down can provide drama by keeping the most interesting tidbits to the end, but in this case it was just regular text that was slowed down.

Second, some people slow down text for cinematic effect, to be like a movie. I think that can be used appropriately (Ryan Veeder uses a nice intro technique in some of his Little Match Girl games), but I personally appreciate it better when it's part of an overall audiovisual strategy and not the only movie-like element used.

So I downloaded the game and edited the code to speed it up. One good rule of thumb is that, if you have trouble sitting through slow text while playing your game (and everyone should play their game while writing it), the player won't enjoy it either.

The second thing is that I found it a little difficult to strategize the different paths of the game. The stats are genius, and they already provide branching and replay value, but I often found it hard to figure out what the effect of each choice would have on stats. I personally would have found it more fun to be more clear.

But these all are just my opinions; there's no one true way to write games, so I offer this as only my own account of my game experience.

As a final side note, I don't drink, but see it a lot in media, and I was pretty surprised by the drink count of my character by the end of the game. I took one drink early on, and after that they ended up pounding down seven drinks in the night, were then invited over for whiskey, and, in one ending, propose going to another bar. I checked and it looks like that amount of drinking can get a lot of people blackout drunk, and is pretty high above the bar for 'binge drinking', so I wonder if our character is a hardcore alcoholic or is going to have a really bad day tomorrow. Both are completely appropriate for this game, so this is not a criticism, it was just fascinating to learn more about drinking culture.

Our story begins with some slow moving timed text. Thankfully, this doesn't carry over completely to the rest of the game. Still, you'd probably want to make a save once you get past it, if you're planning to play more than once. The game does recommend making a save sometime after the introduction... for a different reason.

From what I can tell, there is no undo option, although there is a save system.

Anyway, you're off to a shady place to meet with someone (didn't say human) whom you're supposed to well... do some business with. Nevertheless, you do have the option to talk with him, learn more about him and find out if he is really the creature of darkness he seems to be. (Still, some parts on vegetarianism and compassion in feeding did feel a little awkward.)

The writing is mostly solid, although the game's length didn't quite allow for a deep exploration of the characters and the story. There is a simple stat system, but it didn't work on my mobile browser for some reason, and I had to switch to another phone to see the little stat popups. There is also a good bit of conversational branching, so multiple playthroughs might be necessary to see more of the content. Having played through about three times, I managed to unlock two different endings, although I didn't feel like going back for yet another round.

Overall, it's a fairly solid short read. I would give 3.5 stars, but I'll round that off to 4 stars for this review. (Don't get me wrong, the timed text is still a pain.)