fun game, cool premise. that said, i found that to really get passed a lot of this, you really need to be a philosophy student. you can work around it a bit, but some parts i was stuck. nevertheless, this must have taken a long time to create these arguments. so kudos to you! it certainly paid off and made the game very interesting :)
Reviews for "Socrates Jones: Pro Philo"
I honestly didn't expect this game to be as good as it is. It starts off fairly slow, but when you get into the real debates the game takes off.
If you're of an inquisitive mind you should definitely play this game. How the debate works is the person gives their full statement, then it's automatically split up into small sections which you can ask for clarification on, ask for proof, or question relevance. Doing this can get a person to rephrase their statement or add an additional statement (which you can then examine further), remove their statement (if shown to be irrelevant), or add an idea to your "Idea Slate". This is what you must use to ultimately win most arguments - by using an idea on your slate to defeat a part of their statement. The ideas primarily come from your current opponent, so that combined with all the questioning and examining is very reminiscent of how Socrates would approach something put to him.
It is frustrating at times when you need to dig around to find the right objection when the game doesn't entirely follow your thinking, but there are ways through that. You are allowed to question someone's statements as many times as you like, but ideas presented from your idea slate, when wrong, cause a green bar to go down, which if runs out causing you to lose (you can restart the argument - you never have to re-start from the beginning of the game). If you get completely stuck, your best bet it to question everything, and focus on statements that are added or changed to win the argument. The path of the game is completely linear, but the challenge comes from finding holes in their arguments. It is also a great positive that the game is simply questioning other people's answers, and not actually telling you how things are or being preachy about it. At the same time, I can imagine no game more likely to make someone into a better person than this - simply for the examination of morality.
It's very well written - possibly the best writing I have seen in any game (including commercial games), and it remains consistently good. It's a good mix of humour with real emotion - it's a shame it couldn't be voice acted, but in reality there's just so much there it would take too long to hear it all - you'd end up reading it instead. I did think I was maybe missing something though because there are credits for the voices, but as I mentioned no voices. Only 1 word is voiced, and you'll find out what that is (part of the humour!). The story is great - it would have been fantastic had it been longer, but I can't penalise it for that because it already feels substantially lengthy, with plenty of content. Any more might cause heads to explode.
The animation is not all that animated, but it conveys the important stuff such as facial and arm expressions, and lip movements. Again this could be improved upon, but only to very limited benefit for the game.
I don't give out 5 star reviews very easily, but although I pointed out a couple of areas where the game could be made even better, I feel this deserves it. The content couldn't be much better, and any improvements would either be window-dressing, or simply an extension to the game.
Speaking of extensions... please make some! It could be perhaps done in a sequel where is reason is found to continue the search for the answer, or they could simply be presented as an extension to this game, as if you had spoken to a few more people before making that game-changing statement to the arbiter. I need to keep my appointment with Nietzsche!
Finally, just to end it off - Wonderful Game. Play it. Your brain will thank you.
cool game! thank you
I'm pretty sure, that Charles Darwin could argue whether morality comes from trees.
Also, Freud would have been an interesting character to debate with in this game.
Needs medals! Pretty cute game though, disappointed we didn't get to face Nietzche I was kind of was kind of anticipating it.