Pretentious Isn't the Right Word
PC
- Premise seemed interesting enough to warrant the $7 purchase, but that was purely based on how good the quality of the presentation is -- perhaps a bad decision. From the trailer, this Flash-based game is a moody yet meditative piece of interactive storytelling of a woman recovering from a traumatic accident.
The problem, of course, is that its story is either too sparse or too bland. The intro involves multiple friends in a car, but we never understand what happened to them. Often when collecting the memory-infused Polaroids, the character will ramble or give instructions to the player (she talks about a spray bottle for some reason). Navigation can occasionally be too cumbersome, with the Okami-esque drawing system not fully explained. Why am I making Sprint ads with my movements and actions?
While the game does let you veer off the beaten path, there's no reward -- like an alternate ending -- besides a neat little animation for doing so. The only reward for doing so is receiving a check in the box for finding it. When I opened a box, why did red blood cells go floating out like balloons? Oh, back to the title page. Pointless.
The woman's VO is -- to put it nicely -- boring, delivered dryly without emotion as the short soundtrack loop repeats a bit too much. There's a lack of drive with the game, yet it is incapable of reaching a point of calmness that I believe it's after. The digital clicking sounds for movement between the still photographs become annoying, especially when so when searching for all the Polaroids.
I've read elsewhere about the air of pretentiousness, but I don't believe that's a fair assessment. To be pretentious, I believe the creators would had to actually been capable to do as such. Rather, there's an air of experimentation gone wrong. This could have been an emotional experience, but it fails by being a naive mumbled mess. Every movement-related Polaroid that repeated across the four chapters was removing me from the experience. I would prefer those repetitions were filled with more story elements that would fascinate me and ask me to return. When I went back and tried to find every hidden bit, I wished it was more like Samorost and was filled with hidden things and objects to find and interact with.
What ends up happening, though, is that these dreams start to feel like unwanted and unwarranted nightmares. [SPOILER-ish?] But this game does fascinate me to some weird level because by the end of it, with the final cutscene where nothing happens -- and I mean nothing-- I came to the realization that this woman killed all of her friends in a car accident. But this is never explained and truly alluded to. Presumptuously, the ghosts in her memories are those friends. But she’s still too concerned by her law school exams to really care, and since we’re playing as her, we too struggle to really care.
[1/5]