The Murder in the Fog - Xiao Ru

[perhapsdessert]

On a freezing night,the classroom was surrounded by fog.A girl sent you a wired picture ,saying that she’s in danger and ask for your help. She was the one you had affection with. What would you do ?

https://ifcomp.org/play/1814/play_online

…Yeah. So far, I also enjoy this quote as a blurb–

“What the fuck is that? We had chemistry classes in the chemistry building. Now it has turned into a biochemical crisis!” You swore quietly.

Though, the first choice being between “I will only accept if you’re a girl” and “I’ll only accept if you send me a sexy videoclip” is kind of killing my translation-is-frigging-hard sympathy.

…And now it broke, replaying the same text and sending me to the same choice, except I couldn’t pick either of the options because it remembered I already had…

So let’s be honest, the translation/writing is dodgy as hell. There’s background music, which I personally hate, but that’s very obviously a personal preference. The text is gray over a background image and can’t be highlighted either, which makes it a pain to read sometimes. I’ve kind of had enough of pervy VN protagonists, and the horror movie setup isn’t my type either. More schoolgirls getting attacked by psycho entitled killers, that’s what I needed in my life. Though, I do appreciate having “Wow! The cheesy plot appeared in our class!” available as a response. (“Oh look, my best friend and I have the same mother, which we only happened to notice now!”) It can be awfully unclear who’s talking when and through what medium, too. Anyway, I played through to one slasher ending (I think ending 1, though that bit wasn’t translated), and I think that’s enough for me. Though I guess it could be fun to Let’s Play, in its way.

[dhakajack]

I’ve posted a review here: blog.templaro.com/review-murder-fo/. Here’s the bit above the cut for spoilers:

This appears to be one of the games developed in Qiaobook by a Chinese author and ported to English for this year’s IFcomp. I had difficulty following the writing, probably because of translation issues, but I have to give the author credit for spellchecking more effectively than many authors who use the latin alphabet day in and day out.

I can at least address one readability issue: the font. The game employs a greenish font on a blurred background image. I couldn’t find a screen setting that gave me sufficient contrast to read the text, and I am sure it must be even worse for anyone with visual impairment. While I don’t like altering the visual presentation the author had in mind, here’s how I would make this high-contrast for legibility:

Download the game from IFcomp, open the read_v2.css file in a text editor and change two things: the background and the text color. Then, launch the game from the local index.html file in a browser. For me, Firefox worked better than Chrome.

Original read_v2.css:

[code]* {
background-color: transparent; }

.dark .read-text, .dark .read-title h1, .dark .icon-list li {
color: #909499; }[/code]

Modified read_v2.css:

[code]* {
background-color: white; }

.dark .read-text, .dark .read-title h1, .dark .icon-list li {
color: black;
}[/code]

As for the game itself, the lead character is a highschool sophomore a chemistry attending class, when an experiment fogs up the classroom. The lights go out and he receives a text message on his phone’s QQ app (see wikipedia article for background). Then things begin to get creepy in several senses.