I’ve played a few short games, and after turning them over in my mind for a while, I’ve decided that I only have enough meaningful thoughts about them to populate some short reviews. So the next few will be relatively brief.
Review of Deliquescence
This is a very short, very sad, very powerful game. Your friend will die in less than a minute of real time. There is no apparent way to avert it. What do you do for her?
There is an almost encyclopedic list of options to choose from—talking about your friendship, talking about her condition, talking about the weather—all of which lead to little exchanges that feel very real. I can believe both of these characters, I can believe that this is how two friends might act when one of them is dying.
A single playthrough is only enough to pursue a very small handful of the options, and I found myself wishing for more time. This is thematically fitting. But I actually do think the experience would have been better with a bit more time. As it was, I replayed several times to learn more about the characters, but some of the magic is lost when you start going through this more than once.