Let Them Eat Cake by Alicia Morote
Let Them Eat Cake is choice game – I don’t know whether short or long, for reasons that will become clear – in which your ostensible mission is to gather ingredients for a cake by talking to people in the quaint small town you live in. For me this rings a bell labelled ‘JRPG’, but I haven’t actually played enough of that genre to know whether this labelling makes sense. Anyway, Let Them Eat Cake quickly, nay, very quickly subverts the expectations here, because every person in town is quickly discovered to be either a murderer or a swindler. This creates some good narrative tension, especially because being too inquisitive can lead to death at the hands of a murderous farmer who feeds people to his pigs. (This is a Snatch reference, perhaps? And the severed hand might be a reference to the IF game ) Unfortunately, once I had gathered the ingredients I got stuck in a loop. When I make butter in the bakery, the game then shows me an ingredient list on which butter is still not made; clicking the butter restarts the entire bakery scene. There seems to be no possibility of escape. I gather that other reviewers did not get stuck at the point.
What I saw of Let Them Eat Cake was rather disjointed: okay, all these people are horrible, but how do these stories tie together? This question seems extra important because some of the crimes are relatively innocent (mixing sawdust with flour), while others surely must become the main focus of the story (the poisoning of the fiancee, who is also, I suppose, the person being eating by the pigs). Given the show-stopping bug I ran into, I can’t say how these tensions are resolved or if they are resolved at all.
Presentation is very nice, with good colours and fonts. The writing could use another round of editing. As a small example:
The first half of this is very awkward grammatically (there’s nothing for ‘the first’ to refer back to, and also nothing for ‘that’ to refer back to). The second half bungles the metaphor: the point of a breath of fresh air is that you draw it, not that it passes over you.