love the concept and story you sir are brilliant most little kids wont understand the story behind this that's why they are writing sucky reviews but in my case i loved it keep up the good work
Reviews for "RAPTUS"
Wall of text, sorry dude.
I'm majoring in music, I love artistic things, and sometimes I've had to accept works that I don't like at all as art. Your game is still artistic, but to be honest I have a hard time really...caring about this game. The use of the pixels is awesome, the lighting effects, etc. I also thought it was cool that you could push the man towards the woman.
I've read your responses (interactive flash game, what the clicking means, etc) but you really should have made the theme of how you are "Forcing him to do those things" more obvious. To players, they KNOW they are making him do things. That's how games work for the most part; you manipulate your environment.
Perhaps give people more obvious options on how to affect his life, because until I read your responses, this game was "Click to see a story about how this guy killed some woman." which I saw coming the moment he said the word "her." Perhaps have had him rebel against your actions. He seemed really passive, so the thoughts seemed to have come from his head.
You could have done a lot more, ESPECIALLY the in scene where you do nothing but click near the building. Perhaps have had him say "NO!" "I DON'T WANT TO!" "STOP MAKING ME!" etc. (I saw words, but they were from the woman's side, so if HE was saying that, you need to make it more clear as I thought the woman was saying that.)
Near the end, maybe make him say "I can't do it...these impulses are overwhelming" or something, or just show his thoughts in sentences that become less and less sane. This was a VERY underdone part of your game, for the point you wanted to get through. Horrifically under-explained even for the art game genre, and that's saying something.
It's not good if all your meanings are lost, especially if what people absorb in its place is some static series of events. (The story of the man killing the woman.) I encourage you to make more things, for sure, but...yeah. This one...it needs work.
You know, you've said so many times that this isn't a video game, instead it's an "interactive fiction". Why does it have to be interactive anyway? Aren't video games "interactive fiction" in the first place? Isn't this under the "games" tab? So why isn't it a game? Because it shouldn't be a game. If you group it into something, whilst continuously claiming that it is not within that group, then why place it into that group in the first place? If you have to tag your video game as 'movie', then you're already doing it wrong.
AlanZucconi responds:
Hi ninetails!
The difference between a "videogame" and a "interactive fiction" is that in the latter the gameplay is pretty much just "advancing" dialogues. In a movie there is no interaction at all.
RAPTUS would have been nice as a movie. However, this would remove the most important part of it: the responsibility of the player. For this reason, it can't be a movie. I used the tag "movie" because Newgrounds seems not to allow "interactive fiction"! :p
RAPTUS, for all the reason that you have already read, it oriented to a quite narrow audience. Being features on the first page makes the ratio "people who understand RAPTUS / people who play RAPTUS" below 0.5. :-p I don't expect everyone neither to like it nor to understand it. However, someone did. And someone understood the full message of the game. And for me, this is enough. :-)
good game
i love these art games i think this one was kinda creepy andsad but rather good