afflicted

Afflicted
by Doug Egan

This is an entertaining horror piece, well written and implemented, with a suitably atmospheric opening text, and some pleasant moments of shock and tension. There are no real surprises here &mdash when you play a sanitary inspector investigating "Nikolai's Bar and Grill", you pretty much know what you're in for &mdash but the game delivers on your expectations, and delivers them well.

I admire the game design of Afflicted: the tasks in front of you are clear, and you always have both a reason to proceed and an idea of how to do it. At one point, the play shifts from finding and noting down the dozens of sanitary violations, which is entertaining in itself, to something suddenly much darker. This transition is smoothly handled and seems plausible in context: there comes a time when it is entirely natural to forget about the inspection and just get the hell out of there by any means possible.

As polished as Afflicted is in many ways, I'm reluctant to give it too high a mark. The game somehow lacks that real spark of personality that would take it to the next level. It's good genre writing, it's a good genre plot, but there's nothing here to elevate it above the generic. The game is also let down a bit by its last act: Nikolai the vampire is static and unthreatening when he appears, and his nemesis Sofia is rather easy to dispose of.

I suppose the game's main gimmick is that it forces you to dispense with a body part to gain its optimal ending, in which the PC reflects that it was worth losing his right hand to rid the city of a coven of vampires. This just distances me from the character, I'm afraid: it's not a trade I would make, especially since the vampires seem to have been petty criminals at best, whose worst crime was serving shit food to drunks. In that case, every diner in town would be worth getting dismembered for.

Rating: 6

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