What follows is a much longer and more detailed review than I have written for other games in this competition. My hope is that others will read this and reply. I am curious if others have similar feelings about this game. The following review contains mild spoilers, but does not reveal the solutions to any puzzles or give away the ending. I can't give away the ending. After three hours of play, I still haven't reached the end game.
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I haven’t quite finished playing One Eye open, but I think I must be getting pretty close to the finale. I also haven’t been carefully timing my play (which has been broken into several sessions) but I must have already passed the two hour time limit for judging. That speaks to the game’s staying power. Yet it is far from perfect.
One Eye Open is much larger than the average competition entry. Some of the writing is dense (without ever quite feeling like a text dump.) In fact, the writing is one of the strongest features of this game. I have mixed praise and criticism for the overall design, as well as more serious criticism about the parser.
The game begins with an adult content warning, followed immediately by an introduction of the character as a guinea pig enjoying a comfortable existence in a psychic research center. I read that first paragraph and laughed out loud, imagining myself as a literal psychic guinea pig. I assumed the adult content warning was tongue-in-cheek and that I would be playing a comedy. This misunderstanding was reinforced by the fact that I couldn’t speak with the research examiner who was holding up ESP cards on the other side of a glass window. It was further reinforced by the flimsy character description offered after self examination.
Yet I was soon dissuaded of my belief that this might be a comedy (and my starring role as a cheeky rodent with psychic powers.) First, the absence of any further characterization of myself as a small fury animal, with the corresponding physical limitations. Second, the appearance of a bloodied corpse impaled on a room sized tooth located in my private quarters across the hall. As Dorothy said to her dog Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
My initial misimpression may have actually had a positive effect on my appreciation for the later story. It intensified my feeling of horror on discovering the impaled body across the hall. Without that sense of contrast, there really is no other build up to the onslaught of gore and carnage which follows. This is one of my criticisms of the overall story design. By midgame I was already feeling numb to the personification of the building itself as the innards of a hungry monster. There needs to be a more gradual build-up of this nightmare setting. On the other hand, there are flashes of hope and optimism which appear at specific points in the game, and which bolster the player’s will to continue.
Most of the game is spent exploring the bowels (literally) of this five story research hospital, while collecting scraps of paper which bring together the back story. Very early in this process I came to recognize that my character was experiencing some kind of psychic nightmare, at once a premonition of the near future and a flashback to events that took place thirty five years earlier.
The pacing of this back story worked well during my play-through. I have seen other games of this sort where the pacing is quite clunky. The player hits some obvious trigger and the narrative moves forward. Or the player overlooks a critical clue and the narrative stalls, while the player searches fruitlessly through locations they’ve already seen. Here the pacing is achieved more fluidly through a series of simple (but quite varied) lock and key puzzles. New areas for exploration are opened at just the right pace. The puzzles are almost completely integrated into the story, with the effect that they might go unnoticed as a pacing mechanism, or even a puzzle, by more casual players.
What disappointed me in this game were parser and programming errors. If one tries to exit north from room 322, the error message says “The only exit is north, into the hallway”. The correct exit direction, south, is given in the room description. I don’t understand how this error could even occur. It would not be produced if the author were using a standard “wrong exit” programming extension.
Some errors are distracting. A fan in the basement boiler room is simultaneously static and spinning wildly in the room description. Other errors are frustrating. A map that can be examined but not read. Mirrors and windows that can be examined but not looked into. The facility is littered with corpses but the word “body” is not a recognized synonym. Card is not a synonym for keycard. I experienced frequent disambiguation errors related to the many scraps of paper I needed to collect. Indeed, there ought to be an easier method for navigating the back story notebook which the player compiles throughout the game.
In summary, a huge game, compelling story, parser needs more beta testing
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