Kinophobia

I want to say right off the bat that Kinophobia, gets brownie points for having the map and list of commands as separate webpages, rather than having to navigate the parser to bring them up. This is a game where you have to keep a lot of mental plates spinning, and I found myself making lists of important search terms so I wouldn't forget to research them. Having to interrupt that to bring up an in-game map rather than just clicking a tab over would have driven me bonkers.

Besides its commendable formatting, Kinophobia has a lot of great things going for it. The standout for me is the writing; scenes are beautifully and clearly set, documents feel authentic to both time period and format, and the world is so fleshed out it was sometimes hard for me to tell what was fully fictional. There isn't much in the way of dialog (until the climax), but what was there I found uniquely clever and witty, a welcome respite from all the horror and asbestos.

While it may initially seem like a standard haunted house-type exploration game, the core puzzle element of Kinophobia is actually research. In fact, I only recall two environmental puzzles in the entire game, which does bring somewhat into question why we didn't just do all this Googling before we started wandering around Health Hazard Studios, but whatever. As I implied in my intro paragraph, the documents and articles you find aren't merely a straight line of inquiry, one prompt into another. They branch off, spider into each other, lead to dead ends and cul-de-sacs. I found myself frequently following a string of informational pearls I thought would have all the answers, only for it to loop back onto itself, or for the reveal to be something I already knew. This wasn't frustrating, it was engaging.

What was frustrating was the way the game organizes the items and information you've collected. Maybe it would be a betrayal of the spirit of the parser game, but I really think Kinophobia would benefit from a side menu where you could see your notes and inventory alongside the main text. I tried keeping track of everything in a separate document, but quickly found that keeping everything up to date was a puzzle unto itself, and a crappy one at that. Oh, and while I'm complaining, the psychic vision mechanic didn't gel with me at all. That may be because I forgot about it until the end of the game, and had to go through my entire inventory and touch everything one after another in hopes of a ghost popping up.

Still, I wouldn't be giving it five stars if I didn't think Kinophobia made up for those shortcomings. If you want the thrill of urban exploration, the satisfaction of uncovering forgotten facts, and the scares of a great ghost story, I can't recommend this one highly enough.