Beat Witch (Robert Patten)
Note: it is late, and I just played this game and wrote the review in one sitting. I then read a few other reviews, and my reaction was… a bit idiosyncratic. I’m leaving it as-is because it’s also honest, but my emotions were also running a bit hot, so take this with at least a bit of a grain of salt.
This game contained a very interesting story. And it had zero regard for anyone wanting to interact with it in the slightest. It wanted nothing more than to shout its story at you.
In parser form, no less!
Like, if this was Twine, at least it could have been honest about it, and done the ‘click to continue’ thing the entire game, and it would have been weird (‘why was this IF?’) but at least you would have known what you were in for. Instead, I just fought. With. The. Game. At. Every. Turn. Every so often, you are given the illusion of freedom, where you can try to do things. If you don’t do the one thing the game wants you to do, it will berate you instead. Here is the moment when I finally lost it with the game.
Context: you can DRAIN and GIVE LIFE to things. You are falling off a building. A crow has decided to fly down with you for no discernable reason. ‘Well hey’, I think, ‘Maybe I can give everything to the crow and turn into the crow myself?’
>give life to crow
Your panic leads to insanity. Giving life to an animal is like fitting a key into the wrong lock.
[5000 lines of text]
>[When I try to do one single thing in this game that might work, can you at least do me the courtesy of not mocking me for it? Oy gevalt.]
[5000 more lines of text where the game continues to play itself at me, at one point actually taking over the keyboard, not willing that I should dare to type a single incorrect character]
>[good lord in heaven above]
Please rephrase that.
>[I will not.]
Please rephrase that.
>[You mock me at every turn to shout your freaking story at me and I am sick to death of it.]
Please rephrase that.
And the thing is, I wouldn’t have been nearly as upset if the story and the world hadn’t been so interesting! There’s a crazy world imagined here, with music and magic and life and death and horror and pain and loss, and YOU GAVE ME A COMMAND LINE INVITING ME INTO THIS WORLD AND KEEP YANKING IT AWAY FROM ME!
‘But tell me how you really feel, Lucian.’
I feel like I was betrayed by someone who should have been a friend. I feel like I met someone who seemed cool and was into the same things I was into, and I took the risk to go talk to them, and they ignored me completely and instead noticed a mirror behind me, walked up to it, past my outstretched arm, and started making out with it.
If there wasn’t so much to be lost, I wouldn’t be so upset.
Did the author have something to say? YES!
Did I have something to do? NO!!!
Transcript: beat_witch.txt - Google Drive