A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric by Ole Hansson
This one didn’t work for me at all, but other reviewers seem to have enjoyed it. So my complaints may be idiosyncratic. One thing I notice is that reviewers who post play times seem to have finished this game in a little over fifteen minutes, whereas I got stuck again and again, and was only able to proceed by using the walkthrough for almost every step along the way.
Twice it was the interface that tripped me up. At one point, you have to click on the picture to proceed; but at no point was I cued into the idea that I might have to click on a picture. At another point, you have to notice that something is happening in a picture on the left of the screen while you’re reading text at the right of the screen. This totally didn’t catch my attention. In general, in a game that shows both pictures and text, I’m not really seeing the pictures unless I make a deliberate effort of will to check them out. I also noticed this when playing the Dr. Who game – I can’t recall most of the visuals of that game because I was focused on the text and hardly ever looked at them. No doubt this is one of the idiosyncracies that kept me from really enjoying A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric.
But what is surely a more objective problem with the game is the total lack of context. We’re thrown into the middle of a situation where everything is weird and everything is unexplained. The main NPC is a bizarre character only interested in himself, who is nevertheless taking a cake to his uncle (this seems very out of character), and there seems to be a starter gun as part of the present, which is an ominous discovery… but a starter gun is a perfectly legal object to own, and yet the PC is some kind of cop who is intent on finding out about this not-illegal object, and who then, instead of doing a cop thing, writes an invitation to a duel in the front of a book? I have literally no idea what any of this is supposed to mean.
The problem is, I am supposed to understand enough of it to intuit my character’s goals and the puzzle solutions. Why would I think that the NPC will write his own phone number on the wall when I scratch out the name in a heart? It makes no sense. I had at some point understood that I probably needed his phone, but I couldn’t search his bag, so I gave up on that line of thought. Turned out that I needed to somehow know that he has forgotten his phone, and then also somehow know that he will write his phone number on the wall if he sees a heart with someone else’s name in it, and then also somehow know that if I call this number at one exact moment in the game he’ll return to pick it up, and then also somehow know that writing his name on the wall is an activity so absorbing to him that it will allow me to steal his phone. It’s like I have to read the author’s mind four times to solve a single puzzle. And on top of that the solution is diegetically absurd, because it brazenly requires the player character to have knowledge he can’t possibly have.
I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And then, once you’ve jumped through the hoops, you get this story that again seems to require context you don’t have. Who am I? Who is my enemy? What’s so important about a starter gun? I have no idea, and A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is not going to tell me.