20 Exchange Place
In 20 Exchange Place, you play as an NYPD officer trying to deal with a hostage situation at a bank. The PC is world-weary and sarcastic; the people around him are mostly incompetent; the stakes are high; the pace is fast.
This has the makings of a solid interactive action movie, if only it had some polish. But as it is, 20 Exchange Place feels like a game made in a great hurry. The dialogue is punctuated correctly only about half the time. The second-person POV keeps slipping into first-person. (Some of this seems to be unmarked reporting of thoughts, but there are places where it’s unambiguously narration.) There are a lot of words that are capitalized for no apparent reason. I try not to get too snotty about writing mechanics, because I know that it’s hard for many people, but the types of mistakes found in 20 Exchange Place seem to speak more of a lack of self-editing than a lack of understanding.
The game is also unforgivingly difficult, and the fact that you can only keep one save at a time makes it harder. I didn’t have it in me to keep replaying from the start to figure out how to successfully rescue the hostages, especially as the game seems to expect you to do this by trial and error.
As a final note, the grey-on-white text of the game’s light mode combined with the very light font weight was pretty hard to read (although dark mode would still have been worse for me).