Monday 20 December 2010

999

9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

Played a little bit last night, all text, just enough to get to the first major decision (and first grisly death. Or is it?). Enough to confirm that this game really is what Fatal Hearts was: a fully branching multiple ending adventure/visual novel. And also like Fatal Hearts, it includes bad guys in gas masks, BECAUSE GAS MASKS ARE REALLY CREEPY LOOKING.

Which is not to suggest that the author has ever even heard of my game, of course. :) Still, I take a bit of amusement in my (afaik) legitimate first, especially since so many marketing people LOVE to boast about something being the first of its kind when it absolutely isn't.

So, I'm clearly going to have to play this many times. Annoyingly, there is no text speed control in the options, and progressing through the text is a lot of tap-tap-tap-tap. However, the game manual does list buttons to hold down to fast-skip through text you've seen before, so hopefully it would work all right on replay.



One interface tidbit: There's a large cast, but (so far) no voices. However, when each character speaks, there's that little typewriter noise made as the letters appear (a sound effect which doesn't happen for the narration segments on the bottom screen). Each character's typewriter noise is set to a different pitch, so you can still get the effect of different people talking when they have conversations.

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