Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses by Lacey Green
One thing I may never understand is that there are so many ChoiceScript games that allow you to first choose your own gender, and then choose the gender of potential romantic partners. I just don’t get the point. If the gender of the protagonist and/or their romantic partners are relevant to the story, then I’d like the writer to pick them for me and make sure the story works as intended. And if they are not relevant to the story, well, why am I being asked to make an irrelevant choice? (I suppose somebody could make a game that is intended to be replayed and in which you find out, during play, the difference between playing as a male or female, straight or gay character… but that would be a particular kind of game, and these games are usually not that.)
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses is an extremely short game, and yet it still starts with a sequence in which I choose my gender and the gender of my love interests. Since the romance really doesn’t go anywhere, it almost seems like a parody of standard ChoiceScript practices, but there is little indication that it was meant that way.
Despite a rather large number of language errors, Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses shows some potential. The main character’s grim determination to find out who stole their glasses reminded me a lot of the main character of a German children’s book that is also popular in the Netherlands, Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat (translated into English as The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit). It’s about a mole who sticks his head out of his hole, and then somebody poops on it. So even though he is almost blind, he goes on a determined quest to find out which animal did that to him, because he’ll make them pay! It’s pretty funny.
Unfortunately, Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses seems unfinished. You can get back your glasses… by going to sleep. You can pursue two suspects, but one investigation starts of an interesting storyline that then just stops, and the other investigation goes nowhere. I tried several paths, which was made quite annoying by the fact that you have to click through the same introductory scene every time. Finally, I used the walkthrough, and it turns out that what you have to do to get your glasses back… makes absolutely no sense at all. There’s no logic to it. It’s just that if you happen to jump through certain hoops, a random event will occur that solves the case. Well, okay. It also turned out that many of the achievements have not been implemented yet. Having invested some energy in trying to solve the case, I felt a bit let down by the author.