A Conversation in a Dark Room
Leigh
This game frustrated me. And it frustrated me in a way that a smaller, less ambitious game would not: namely, that it was good enough for me to want more, but then it didn’t provide that ‘more’.
The basic premise is that you are meeting a vampire so you can kill them, because the vampire wants to die. Only you-the-player don’t know that’s the premise; you gradually work that out as you go along. Which was great! I enjoyed the slow revelation of the premise, along with everyone’s emotional response to what was going on. Then there’s some discussion, you get some random ‘your X has increased by 1’ messages based on some of your choices, and then you kill the vampire, because the vampire wants to die. And that’s it.
Now, the game claimed it had ‘five endings’, but I replayed it twice, took what I thought were very different paths each time, and got to the same ending (with very slight nuances) all three times. And that’s… that’s not a story. That’s just the premise. If the writing was weaker, I would probably have sighed and moved on, but the writing was good! There was intrigue! Stuff happened that seemed to hint at stuff going on that would be revealed later! And then nothing was revealed later, and if there are better endings to this game that do something with the premise I could not find them.
Maybe that’s all the author wanted to say. And if so, OK. In that case, I’ll just say that most good stories have some sort of twist or conflict in them, instead of just ‘X set out to do Y. Then X did Y. The end.’
But maybe that’s not all the author wanted to say! Maybe one or more of the other four endings actually have what I want! In that case, I’ll say that as an author, if you let the player have a bad time, that actually is your fault, even if you also have other paths where the player has a good time. The classic puzzle example here is putting a 3-digit combination lock in your game that the player can brute-force their way past without solving the puzzle that tells them the solution is ‘356’. Make the combination longer! Brute forcing a solution isn’t fun for anyone, and if you let your players do it anyway, they will not have fun, and they will blame you for it. And they’re right! Similarly: if you let people in your choice game find a boring story, they will find it and blame you for it. So, here I am, blame in hand.
And once again, the only reason I got frustrated instead of just going ‘enh’ and moving on is that the potential to be better was clearly there. Heck, that better game may actually exist! But if so, it was locked off for me. So I’m… kind of grumbly in response.
Did the author have anything to say? In the game I played? The author had an interesting premise, with zero follow-through.
Did I have anything to do? Not that I could find.