Robert DeFord

This is a choice-based game done in the spirit of the old CYOA books of a bygone era. It was created with Twine and uses one of Twine's two built-in formats (user interfaces) without any obvious typographical/design modifications or custom macros. As such, it offers a fairly good story telling platform, a platform where the game's branching narrative lives or dies based on the author's ability to come up with an interesting plot and write interesting prose. Consequently, that's the focus of this review.

 

First, the plot...

 

Right up front, I'll tell you that this game is about vampires. If you are tired of all the vampire movies, games, books that have inundated us ever since the Twilight movies proved that you can still make a lot of money with this trite, banal genre, then don't play this game. Oh sure, the author has devised a novel theory of how vampirism works, but all but two of the many, many vanpires in the game are just your garden variety of blood thirsty, dimwitted, puppets that serve no purpose other than to serve up gore to the hapless reader/player.

 

However, those two main vampire characters are not just cardboard cutouts to harass or be manipulated by the protagonist. Instead, the have pretty well drawn, but opposite personalities, or as opposite as two vampires can be. The plot hinges on the conflict between these two vampires and between themselves and their common Maker. Our young, pretty protagonist soon becomes the 'pet' of one of these vampires. (Sounds familiar, eh?) Anyway, she gets to see a lot of gore, and she gets to die a lot as you fumble around selecting links trying to find a happy ending.

 

It's the fumbling around that bugged me. I had plenty of interaction, but none of it was logical, nor did I ever feel like I had any real control over the game. Instead, I just selected links more or less at random to see what gory death awaited a protagonist that I sort of began to identify with. Not much fun in that. Finally, by a process of trial and error, I arrived at the sort of satisfactory ending one usually gets in a vampire story. While I didn't yawn, I came pretty close to it. At least the game provided links to go back to the beginning of the last chapter so I didn't have to start over from the beginning from each 'dead' end. (Pun intended.) I didn't spend the time replaying the game to see if there was more than one satisfactory ending to the game or any of its chapters. It's a fairly long game (hour +) and I just wasn't enough of a gore fan to wade through all the blood again, and again. Not much fun in that either.

 

Second, the prose...

 

The author had fun writing the text for this game, and that is its saving grace. As a reader/player, I felt like I was sharing that fun, and I did smile at the occasional witty phrase. However, there are only so many ways that you can throw blood and gore at the audience before you run out of novel ways to do it and they get bored. Plus, this game could have used a lot more proofreading, if indeed it received any at all. While the writing wasn't as bad as am implying here, it was a distraction that lost this game a point or two in my score book, and this game could use all the points it can get.

 

Oh, and this game has LOTS of words. My own game text suffers from this same malady (or so my beta tester's tell me) and I can really appreciate the difficulty of paring first drafts down enough for them to soar. But this game needed fast pacing in order to succeed, and it does that most of the time. However, several times I got bogged down in a wall of text that took too long to wade through. I read in a book on writing (title and author forgotten) a while back that said: "final draft equals first draft less 20%." Good advice for us all, me included.