Façade

4
This game has one of the worst installation processes I’ve ever had to deal with, coming in second to the truly awful installer for Quite Soulless. What kind of installer tells you that it may take half an hour to install, and actually does?

It’s also very incompetently made: you have to guess that enter starts the game, and you need to restart the game completely in order to retry it (it even tells you that), which would be less annoying if the startup weren’t so slow. The game in general has all the hallmarks of being made by academics rather than game designers. But moving on…

The game itself is interesting. It’s not as innovative as its trailer makes it out to be, but the addition of voices adds a lot to a text parser. Most of the time Trip and Grace do not understand what you are saying, though. Even when you type in character. But they do understand some things, but playing the game often feels like a quest to find out what things they respond to by trying a bunch of keywords.

That said, this is a game that everyone into indie or experimental games should try out, just due to its novelty. The first time I played it I felt as socially awkward as I sometimes do in real life, and I think it’s the first game to effectively stimulate social interaction in that way, and that’s an impressive and remarkable achievement, even if how they did was as simple as giving prerecorded voices and facial expressions to a pair of AI chatbots (often with less knowledge of the world than those chatbots).

3 Interesting Concept
I have to rate this based on it’s merits more as an entry from Interactive Fiction than from most other games. It easily drops the player into what it advertises, a one act drama from which the player can positively or adversely affect the outcome. From a technical perspective, the real-time ability to act and react to the two NPCs is quite interesting. The voices are a joy that alone would bring this to the forefront among it’s peers if there were no other innovations.

Unlike other IF’s, the impetus to create full sentences is a real temptation rather than developing simple sentences for the parser. The conversations within the game flow better than you’d expect in part to the AI and the parsing. Like other games though it is fairly linear. While it handles most interactions closely related to the plot or surroundings well enough it feels restrictive. For veteran IF readers, this is part of the earned enjoyment, but for many I imagine it’s can lead to a frustrating experience.

Certainly a large and complex game with it’s problems, but for those interested in trying out the Turing test or interested in playing in an interactive drama, this is a definitely something worth experiencing at least once.