IF Comp ‘08: Afflicted (spoilers)
‘Sanitarian’? Is that a real word? …By George, it is.
Nitpick: If I have a car, I want to look in the trunk, dammit. And the glove compartment.
Ohh, the scoring is clever. I like that.
How do I know Angela’s name? Something like “According to your files, this must be Angela, the day-shift waitress.” would be nice. Would a Health Department guy even have that information?
“If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean!” Gosh, I hate Nikolai already.
syntax: In the mirror you see The window is scratched, but intact.
If this is a bar, where’s the booze?
This is odd:
> look in drain
(the drain cover)You find nothing of interest.
> x cover
The open drain provides access to an underground room.
Occasional missing punctuation at the ends of lines.
You see nothing noteworthy about the mutilated corpse.
Hah, you can cut your own hand off! Did you steal that from my game two years ago, Doug Egan? ;)
Sofia sometimes acts as if she has eyes, and sometimes not. Also, not being able to find the eyes is puzzling, as though I missed something, although as far as I can tell they aren’t anywhere. (After finishing and looking at the walkthru, I find that I did indeed miss them. Odd, I would’ve thought she’d’ve complained more. I guess it would be cruel to *require* them, since if you don’t find them in the beginning, you can’t get back there to get them after the Big Reveal, but still… seems odd.)
Odd phrasing: She levitates out of this location to the dish room, then out of sight.
Lots of possible endings is fun. I didn’t check every possibility I could think of, but I tried a few. More elaborate descriptions of the aftermath would be nice, particularly in the ones where I get “afflicted”.
Summary: No real significant problems or bugs. A neat little horror story. Finding the hand in the bar sink was a good “WTF?” moment, and messing with the buffalo chopper made me genuinely uneasy (and for good reason, it turned out). The enviroments and characters were reasonably detailed and atmospheric, but they could’ve been even more so, I feel — good enough that I can’t complain, but not enough to make me go ‘wow’, you know? Good enough that I would bet that the author could do even better.
Since this is the first game I played this year, I’m not going to give it a numerical rating until I’ve got a better feel for the range. I’ll edit my final score into the post later, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere in the middle of the top half I expect.
