REALLY short. So much potential.
Small interactive fiction. Was part of a udemy course Im doing.
REALLY short. So much potential.
There are problems here:
- Choices are often poorly worded, so it's often hard to figure out what they even mean. Especially the cryptic "shadows" option
- Failure states are not well thought out. Making you engage again with the content you just experienced doesn't add anything but boredom in this kind of game. You could bring the player back to the choice that got them killed, but obviously that isn't very punishing. This is a problem that is kind of at the heart of this genre in my opinion, and I haven't really seen a super elegant solution to it. But, at least for now, I think it would be best to just bring the player back to the penultimate choice instead of making them have to repeat this content.
- At times the game acknowledges that it is a game, such as when it says "the next room will be hard." This adds nothing and ruins immersion. I would rather see it removed.
I could go on, but at the end of the day, this game just isn't engaging. There isn't enough narrative strength or agency (or the illusion of agency for that matter) to really cater to the strengths of the genre. It just feels poorly made. Not much else to it. This isn't a game that could be good if it had problems with it fixed. This is a game that just doesn't have much that is appealing to its name. Sorry.
thank you for the detailed feedback!Agree with your criticisms of the narrative and design.Will keep them in mind when i make the next one.
The whole idea of adventure games is having more than one option