Running this one on Parchment and, since I can’t save with this method (computer issues), I hope there are not a lot of swift deaths.
I took notes while I was playing this so the review may seem more stream of consciousness than some of my others. It took me about an hour-thirty to play.
Starting the game my first question is: why am I so terrified of bicycles? I trust this will be explained.
I at first thought the whole sequence in the garage was another dream sequence, but apparently it’s more like a motif, so I guess that’s Ok.
And, oops, I did die, pretty early on. Thank goodness for undo.
Right about here I encountered what looked like a bug but may have just been awkward scripting:
You can hear the faint singing voice of a little girl coming from somewhere far away.
>jill, come here
You can’t talk to the (Hunting_for_Sister).
Odd. Of course now I’m going to be paranoid that any bugs I encounter are bugs with Parchment rather than with the game, since that apparently got me before. Also:
>down
There’s no need to do that: your little sister is still alive.…Huh?
So about this point I started to notice just how much text the game was supplying for basic tasks like choosing compass directions. I felt pretty railroaded by this game. I know a lot of games this year have been on rails… there was really only one way to do The Duel that Spanned the Ages as far as I can tell, but, it hid the rails a lot better. In this game it basically says, “You feel like talking to her right now” (Jill), and, sure enough that is the only action really available.
And as far as Jill goes… She’s cute and all but just given the title of the game and how innocent and precocious she was and all the impending doomsaying, I figured she was probably going to die. That’s the dilemma here with me talking to her or getting attached to her in any way. If you’re going to kill the little girl (or do something else terrible, as it turns out) you probably shouldn’t telegraph it this badly because it makes people put up their “healthy cynicsm” walls.
Oops, I accidentally typed “talk to kill,” ha ha ha.
Also she keeps repeating some bits, like how she likes the weather, and that makes me think the conversation is done but it won’t let me continue.
The second ‘dream’ sequence took me a while. It’s meaning to tell me that throughout this entire ‘mess of metal and wreck’ there is nothing that can rip a poster? I need a knife for this? The whole business how the poster seems difficult to destroy reminds me a little of similar tasks in Silent Hill. I can’t explain why but they do work better there than here even though this is a clear comparison to me. I think mainly because, it’s a poster; they rip easily.
Jill’s comment about seat belt laws takes me out of the story for some reason because I was pretty sure it was legal to forgo a belt if you were in the back seat of a car but only in certain states and I know she’s just a kid and doesn’t know anyway but it makes me want to stop and look things up.
>my friends are assholes
That’s not a verb I recognise.>xyzzy
[That won’t work here: this is a modern work of IF.]Another moment of silence. “Man,” Sig complains, “you guys are boring me. Why the frick aren’t you talking to me, Dave?”
Good to know it still advances the story. Maybe I can just respond with nonsense and let this game go on without me.
The writing is okay. In some places it’s pretty good and in other places it really jars me for some reason. Why is it that my friends mostly talk like normal people but my character talks like this : “I don’t even have a cellphone, thanks to father’s thriftiness.” “Jill, just leave the bug alone; let nature flourish and be itself.” Or in anotherwise dramatic moment, mom says “…he’s going to hit me. He’s going to abuse me in the name of punishment and emotion release!”
Uh, yeah, I always talk like that.
Also: “You scratch the back of your head, a gesture of shame.” …if you’re in an anime.
Basically the game needed a copy editor to fix some of these awkward phrasings, but sometimes its atmosphere is really good. The end of the game frustrated me a little because it was really unclear what to do in the white room: turns out just keep typing compass directions until one works. Then I need to kill my friend and I don’t know what the fuck.
Game with potential but a bit too on-rails and needed a bit of writing polish. I really hated my character’s friends and no idea why he was so hot to hang out with these jerks when his sister was obviously the picture of perfection. Chalk it up to teenage rebellion and trying to be cool; it still makes my protagonist pretty unlikable that these are the people he wants to hang out with. (Or maybe feels forced to hang out with for some reason. He didn’t really seem to like them either but then was all NO I MUST GO IN THE CAR and I didn’t see what was so bad about riding bikes to school.) I will say that despite my attempt to remain detached the sister coming home from the hospital got to me a bit. This was a better twist than killing her which is what I expected. I can see where having to live with her being brain damaged would hurt the protagonist’s feelings even more than a funeral.
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