Let Me Play!
Let Me Play! is a choice-based game developed in Unity. Some nice art, and background music which effectively established a mood. At points, some of the dialogue choices became a bit hard to read (when the game is scrolling through choices before landing on one). I saw two endings, there might be more.
You’re ostensibly watching a play, and you see all the characters on-stage visibly choosing their dialogue options in the text box area below. Eventually, you, as the player/audience, can interrupt the play, demand control over the dialogue, and it spirals from there.
The first playthrough, the director comes in and objects to my demand. I’m given a couple choices, including one to just leave. I’m someone who will ALWAYS turn down a call to action or whatever the game is obviously pushing on me as the “correct” choice given the first opportunity to do so in these sorts of meta-games, so I left. That’s that apparently, credits rolled.
If I wasn’t trying to judge things for the comp I would’ve stopped there, because the game had not really sufficiently hooked me enough for me to want to play it again from the beginning. I felt obliged to give it another shot though and make some different choices.
Second playthrough was longer. But… we’ve seen lots of meta games about choice before. We get some every IFComp, and hey, maybe I’ve just played way too many of them, and other players might find the experience a bit less well trod than I do. But my 2nd playthrough spun its wheels quite a bit, trotting out a bunch of different characters to dialogue to me about why it can’t cede control of the story to the player, without ultimately landing at any greater point. There’s an idea: it’s a play! You’re a player that wants to “play” the game instead of just watching. But there’s no characters with enough depth to like or dislike, no goals or stakes, no concrete reality or expectations to subvert. It goes off the rails very quickly, and soon sinks into a long stretch of similar-ish meta dialogue choices during the mid-to-late stages, at least down the path I saw. You don’t really have a goal; “keep on reading and occasionally clicking things until you reach an ending” isn’t a very interesting goal, and “try to make the game more interesting” is a goal that the dialogue choices tease you with, but which you unfortunately can’t really steer towards.
This game asks me what I, the player, want. I wanted, ultimately… Not a play. Not more of a game. Not more choice, necessarily. I wanted more of a story that got me invested. This seems to be earnestly trying to work through some ideas about player choice versus story linearity, but it isn’t quite able to draw itself or the player to any strong conclusions. There is effort here though, and I did appreciate its desire to try to explore a slightly unconventional narrative (meta games might not be a novelty anymore, but this is still trying something).