Nah.
Rating: 1
The introductory text is extremely badly written, with tenses all over the place (and not always deliberately), pronouns dangling without any obvious referent, and an air of being much more fluent and witty than it actually is. But at least the author is generous with text in the intro; such generosity quickly disappears in the game proper, to be replaced by minimal descriptions, minimal implementation, minimal cueing of how to proceed, and a lot of bugs and general incompetence. Maybe the new spin on the time travel puzzle might have worked in a playable game.
Rating: 1
Cynical I may be, but I think there's always a suspicion of ambulance-chasing about artistic works that deal with the Holocaust: the subject is a guaranteed shortcut to gravitas, and tends to awe critics into respect or silence. And it's a subject that Buried in Shoes is too slight to bear, for all its apparent sincerity. The prose, which aims at a kind of poetic sparsity, certainly could have been a lot worse, but it didn't do anything to move me. The game is short, railroaded, and barely implemented, and could just as easily be static fiction. I'm not sure how well the shoes symbol would work if it wasn't explained in the ABOUT text, and the final "forgiveness" question comes out of nowhere &mdash if you want me to meditate on the subject of forgiveness, you need to do a lot more establishing work.
I don't know what a good artistic work about the Holocaust would be (or even whether such a thing should be), but I do know that Buried in Shoes is not it.
Rating: 3
Yes, the author was so concerned his game would be taken seriously that he apparently changed his name. A regrettable act, I fear, and an unnecessary one: comedy should speak for itself, and it's always a bad sign when you have to advertise it up front. I can see his motivation, though: the comedic content of this game is so poor that I wouldn't know where to laugh even if you told me.
It's also a bad sign when you begin the game with an apology, as the author does here. If you know your game is shit &mdash and this game is shit &mdash then don't release it. The author threatens to release a "deluxe version" after the comp, and while I absolutely do not believe in constructive criticism, I think in this case I will venture to offer him some advice. Don't bother with another version, and let this game rest. Stick to your social life, kid: we'll all be happier for it.
Rating: 1
It's obvious that little Tommy is for the chop from turn one, so initially I thought that this was a kind of barebones, unravelled Photopia, where the point was to appreciate the little tyke's existence while he's still alive, before fate strikes its cruel and inevitable blow. But from other reviews I learn that Tommy is in fact already dead, and that multiple playthroughs of the game represent the PC's way of dealing with the grief. Whatever. Neither of these ideas is particularly original, but either of them might have worked if the writing was any good &mdash which it isn't.
Rating: 2
I feel bad giving this game a rating of 1, since it is clearly the product of two authors with severe learning difficulties. That they could write and finish a game at all is no doubt a testament to the quality of remedial education today; and even though the result is, by any standard, utterly dreadful, its very existence is still a minor triumph. They and their teachers can feel genuinely proud of their achievement, even as the rest of us move the game to the trash and curse the minute we spent playing.
Rating: 1
The Lucubrator is a curiously boring game in which you play a flesh-eating zombie. It presents a few short vignettes with tightly-timed action scenes, in which you have to execute the magic action at the right time to proceed: always a bad game design. There are bugs and moments of bad writing. The Deadsville fragment from a few Introcomps ago did the zombie gimmick with much more inventiveness and flair, and probably at greater length, too.
Rating: 1
After waiting a minute for the music to load, we set off on the most perfunctory rocket trip in the universe, during which the game rattles off a list of map references from Google Mars. Then the rocket suffers a painful crash. "You rub the injured member ruefully," the game tells me, a phrase which brings a tear of recognition to my eye. With a sad wince, I remember the morning after I fell on my bicycle bar.
I had to give up shortly after that, but A Martian Odyssey is at least memorable for bringing us this year's equivalent of "Don't you want to ask me about her breasts?". Which is something.
Rating: 1
Recess opens with a straw man from Orson Scott Card: "The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood." This leads me to expect the game to be a no-holds-barred, tough, unsentimental look at childhood, in which the agonies and torments of fourth-graders are laid bare.
Instead, we get a nostalgic trip back to a time when cares were utterly inconsequential, when missing breaktime (or "recess" as it's called in American) was a catastrophe, when finishing homework was an epic quest. All this seems rather sanitised and idealised to me, and doesn't chime in with my own memories of being ten years old. Now, perhaps my memories are atypical, and certainly the author (a schoolteacher) is closer to the experience than me, but on this evidence, I don't think he should be so quick to accuse others, however implicitly, of forgetting their own childhood.
I couldn't finish this game. It seems to be well-implemented, but the writing is mediocre and the subject matter is simply not compelling. It's hard to imagine who would want to play this, actually. Few adults would be interested in a game about rooting through folders to finish your school homework, and fewer schoolchildren still.
Rating: 2
The intro to this game is actually quite promising, but then the first turn begins and everything rapidly goes to shit. Crappy implementation, bugs, and then a bit of trollery to cap it all off. If they had put in some work, if they had had any self-esteem, the authors could have built on the promise of their opening; but as it is, it's all a bit sad, really.
Rating: 1