Recent reviews by starfyre

Beautiful environment and moving story. The HD remaster looks great and the game controls well on PC.

This game has everything I wanted out of it. Heaps of humor hidden everywhere. Creative solutions to almost every problem. Tons of collectibles and items ranging from the awesome to the bizarre. A googly-eyed horse.

The writing is on point, the game runs smoothly, and the art is expressive, despite how simple it looks.

My biggest issue with it is that it can seem to drag on if playing for too long at once. There's a lot of text to read, and while it is extremely well written, it can sometimes hit a point where you need a break.

All in all, worth every penny, and probably more than what they're charging here. If you enjoy this game, check out its spiritual ancestor Kingdom of Loathing.

I got this as part of the recent Humble Bundle and figured I should finally get around to playing it. I'd read many, many glowing reviews, as well as some of the more rabid hate pieces it managed to generate. I don't think it deserves quite the level of hate it gets, but it certainly, in my opinion, did not deserve anything higher than a 6/10 anywhere. There isn't much to this, clocking in at just over 2 hours with zero replayability. There is no branching decision-making, there's no mystery left after that initial time through, nothing but a relentless boredom, actively draining fun out of the world. This game should not have been a game. It would have made a decent short film. Maybe an okay novella. A $20 game this is not.

I started my playthrough mostly neutral. It had good atmosphere, there were lots of objects to interact with, and the start of the story was strong. Then, a journal entry starts being read at you, seemingly out of the ether. I didn't find anything that seemed like it should trigger this exposition. It just sort of happened. As a way of delivering the story, random voice-overs from a character who is not present from a book you never find does not seem like a particularly inspired option. The voice work was well done, but the way to access it felt lazy. Touch some random object, get a chung of story read at you. If this was the way they were going to deliver the story, I could deal with it. Maybe I'd find the diary later, making the fact that Kaitlin seemingly knows the content more palatable. Alas, it was not to be.

This leads me on to the story. It was a sweet love story that was well told for what it was. It was not particularly original and it did not make good use of the medium. The side-plots for her parents were particularly dull, feeling more like some badly presented teen drama. The subplot for the uncle started off interesting, and then just fizzled. It felt like everything not related to the standard teenage drama was thrown in to make the game seem less shallow.

Now, on to the "gameplay." In this game, you walk around, pick up objects, read letters, throw things around, and that's about it. Sometimes, they'll get added to your inventory for no real reason other than to justify the fact that you have an inventory. You can't do anything with what's there, really, other than to look at the items again. You click around, maybe cause as much mayhem around the house as possible (This is about the only reason I made it through the plot: destroy everything her family once held dear), and discover the "secrets" of her family through the random letters detailing her father's failures and her mother's indiscretions left strewn about the house in a rather haphazard and entirely illogical manner. If I had secrets to hide, I wouldn't leave them sitting out on the table in the foyer. It all devolves into fetching some key or combination from some container unlocked by another key or combination in a tedious scavenger hunt around the poorly laid out house.

Finally... That house. Their seemingly normal home is riddled with secret passageways, random compartments, and bizzare room connections that make you wonder who in their right mind would ever have built this place. The house is also riddled with Sam's garbage, strewn throughout in a manner that implies that it was not a natural occurrence and was merely contrived in such a way as to force one to explore even more, despite it making no amount of sense whatsoever. It also implies that Sam's supposedly overbearing parents were completely detached from what their daughter was doing while trashing their home. This makes even less sense when you consider that all signs point to her father essentially working out of the home office. Lastly, and this is a minor but rather jarring thing I found, is that Katie has no room in that house. They mention they were going to make up the guest bedroom for her visit, but she has no permanent room. I understand she's supposed to be a college student, but presumably she's coming home for the summers and other breaks.

To summarize, this would have been an ok movie or short story, but not a game. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone, as it is too short with too many glaring issues. This is a game, despite what some reviewers say, but it is not a particularly good one. Very little in the way of gameplay, and the story truly is not revolutionary or unique in any sense of the terms. If you really want to know how it plays out, watch a Let's Play and save your $20 for something that actually deserves it.