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.
Reviews for "RAPTUS"
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. :-)
Click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click... click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . should have been a video not a "game"
A game that tries to hard to be a book that tries to hard to be a movie.
Artistic does not mean slow. It means there's a piece of the creators soul that he/she put onto a an object, may that object be canvas, MSword, javascript, etc.
There's nothing deep at all about this, nothing personal. It's just some crappy music that sets more of the tone of the game then any of the text or gameplay. I don't want to have watch a game or play a movie. I just want to get into it, albeit an art game, then I want to feel the creators personification inside the game.
The 'protagonist' is to obscure to relate to, and the story is to obscure to follow. Long story short, your unrelatable character slowly separates and eventually dissolves any course of relatability through whiny dialogue, and pointless choices, which causes this boring, whiny, hipster inspired loser to make stupid decisions.
That's the complete opposite of what I want from a game/book/movie/etc. It's played out, it's generic, it's annoying.
Well, wasn't that a very boring interactive fiction! If you make games like these, work on the script.
This is such a despicable game, in the fact that the game is trying to imply that you are a unknown being that is controlling the person in question to kill by being a second personality aka the voice the person keeps on about.
The problem is the game is forcing you to kill someone because you need to do it in order to advance it doesn't help that it's quite subtle explaining that your are this voice but when you find out it just makes me hate this game so much.
So you kill someone because you killed them and then your made out to be the bad one because you had no Idea what you were doing and the fact that the game is forcing you to do it.
Okay so, this is ment to be deep? Maybe yes but this game's message is idiotic and stupid because the game is clinical and evil and not in a good way purly because you influenced someone to kill someone and had no idea what was going on, that is moronic.
Whats the point in having a plot that revolves around you killing someone and you didn't mean to do it because you have no concept of whats going on, thats like telling someone with no flying skills to fly a jet in a foreign country and then killing tons of people because you didn't know what to do or were he was or what was happening.
This is bad writing, very bad writing because if you don't know whats going on because you don't then the game is then its forcing you to try and solve things in a INTERACTIVE FICTION which should be done for you.
Really some people may find this smart but I find it dumb and idiotic making the plot create a plot hole of its own as not knowing whats going on and the game making you kill him with knowing is a plot hole.
Good graphics however and the music is.......I really don't know what it is, but because of this game's ability to defy plot and logic it fails on almost every level.
Graphics 1 music 1/2 plot 0 (This is an interactive fiction plot makes a heavy impact in games like these)
AlanZucconi responds:
Hi! Thank you for the message.
RAPTUS is a little bit on the edge. It's not completely a game, but it's not even a movie.
It should be a movie, but I decided to put a little bit of interaction to increase the "interactivity" and to make the player feels integrated with the game. However, the plot is fixed. Exactly as it is fixed in a movie. Your same argument can be applied to all the horror movies, for instance. You have no ability to change the plot. But you don't turn off the tv neither. Does this makes you responsible for all the deaths in that movie? [this is actually a real and well known philosophical argument :p ] With RAPTUS is the same. The interaction is there to make you feel integrate, not to make you change the story.
However, in the end... ...after emotions grew inside you, I let you decide how to end the story.
The key aspect of RAPTUS is the fact that ...you can't always change the past. You have to accept that sometime things happened, and live with your mistake.