This game opens with a cliched and condescending description of a
Parisian cafe, which succeeds only in capturing the pedestrian mind of a
certain kind of tourist; I can't tell to what
extent this effect is deliberate. It initially seems like one of those
irritating Curses-like games where you have to jump through hoops
to accomplish some trivial task you could quite easily abandon &mdash in
this case, getting a stereotypically rude French waiter to serve you.
But soon the PC meets a beautiful girl, the April of the title, another American tourist, who appears to be in some distress. They talk, and for a moment it seems like the game will be something else: a game about people, about stories, about relationships. April and the PC share a fleeting moment of intimacy; she breaks down in tears; she is about to tell us her story, when &mdash when it turns out that no, the game really is one of those annoying Curses-like games where you have to jump though hoops to do some trivial task you could quite easily abandon. What a disappointment. If you have to solve a fucking Babel Fish puzzle to get April inside the cafe, why not take her to a different cafe? What kind of idiot is the PC?
This game, and others like it, rest on the assumption and understanding that the PC is really a compulsive puzzle-solving nerd, and the NPCs are really bits of clockwork who behave in some inhuman and repetitive way until the right button is pressed. And I'm supposed to care about any of these characters? Please.
To give an indication of what you're up against here: for April to enter the cafe, the PC must steal a coin to pay the accordionist to ask him to leave so that the old man next to you will stop listening so that you can ask him to ask the hostess to swing things your way.... I'm sorry, but no. Even apart from how contrived and ridiculous this chain of events is, the puzzle is badly clued. How am I supposed to know the old man will persuade the hostess? Because, the hint system explains, they're about the same age. I can also confirm that they were wearing the same colour, their first names are anagrams of each other, and the first sentence the guy speaks is an acrostic of "MADAME" if you add the "D" embroidered on his necktie.
Even after jumping through hoops to get April into the cafe, it turned out that I had to jump through more to get a word out of her. And since, in the meantime, she had all the conversation skills of a broken ATM, I chose this point to bale out. So I'll never know if we had another Before Sunset on our hands.
Rating: 2