Review of "the virtual human" Review of "the virtual human"the virtual human is an ADRIFT 4 interactive fiction game and is © 2008 by Duncan Bowsman.
Review by David Welbourn (originally posted at IFDB)
How unusual. This isn't a game, but a chatterbox-cum-madlibs exercise where the player answers questions about a virtual human and their environment by entering arbitrary words and short phrases, and these answers are incorporated into the ongoing poem.
The usual IF commands like "look" and "inventory" are quite meaningless here, so players may not consider this to be "IF" at all. At least, not normal IF. It's not really like Fugue, The Space Under the Window, or On the Other Side, but it's closer to those than most other IF offerings I can think of.
A couple caveats: Note that since there's almost no checking that your inputs are valid, it's best to play it straight. If you insist on typing in nonsense, you'll get nonsense printed back at you. Also, please avoid typing AND or commas in your responses; that gets your input line interpreted as multiple inputs. Type an ampersand, &, when you want an AND.
This isn't a deep game by any means, and it certainly won't teach you much of anything about yourself, etc. But because the virtual human is so short and so different, I do recommend that players try it out.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️