Saturday, April 11, 2009
Spring Thing 2009 reviews: Vague - Richard Otter
This is a review of a game in the 2009 Spring Thing Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want to read spoilers. You have been warned.
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Vague
by Richard Otter
The title was quite appropriate, because I beat this game and I still have no idea what it was about.
From reading other reviews, it seems to be a mashup of Richard Otter's other games, which would make things so much clearer if I had played any of them. So I suppose I wasn't the target audience for this. Maybe the whole storyline about my being a murderer (and perfectly willing to kill cats) and everything being painted on would make sense if I'd played some of them.
I can only comment on the technical aspects, then:
- A "you have amnesia" introductory infodump, hastily lampshaded by some talk about how this isn't "badly written interactive fiction." It doesn't work.
- A lot of stationary, barely-implemented NPCs that the hint system tells me can tell me things, but recognize precious few topics.
- Various spelling/grammar errors suggesting a lack of proofreading.
- The ending. A "It was all an IF game!" ending? Really? Really? There's twist endings, and there's just being ridiculous. Guess which this was?
Maybe somewhere out there is a rabid Richard Otter fan who'll reveal all kinds of hidden subtleties and references and in-jokes in this, but I don't know who that would be.
(Minor note: Some character names are just too loaded now to use. Like Jack Thompson.)
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