Condemned

I found out after playing this that this was written by the same person who gave us "Press Escape To Save" a couple of years back. I must say, there's been a significant amount of improvement since then, in the craft and in the writing. There are still a few places where the vocabulary is a bit awkward, and it is true that the character of Jill doesn't sound like an 8-year-old girl, but other than that, the story is coherent (or as coherent as any mishmash of real and symbolic can be) and really quite powerful. This makes me want to see what the author will give us in another two years, when presumably he improves even further.

With regard to the story itself, one thing that occurred to me some time later was to wonder if perhaps the player character in the garage scenes is not in fact David, the protagonist of the flashbacks, but Pete. There is a suggestion at one point that there is another person locked away inside the car in the garage, and Pete strikes me as being the character most concerned about concepts of right and wrong and responsibility. And then, there is the fact that the character in the garage crucifies himself -- or, at least, sets up his own crucifixion. In our modern times, the image of the crucifixion is not merely related to punishment, but to redemption and sacrifice as well: it is related to the concept of the scapegoat, one person suffering in the place of another. The idea of mere punishment would have been better served by almost any other image, but the use of the crucifixion suggests that the person in the garage is not, in fact, the person most responsible for the tragedy -- of course, he must consider himself at least partly responsible or he wouldn't consider the action (he is not the Messiah, after all) but I think that for the crucifixion image to work we need some sense of the victim sacrificing himself to pay someone else's debts.

This is not a fun game, nor is it the best written or best designed (there is rather too much text interspersed with waiting) but it does show a great deal of potential.

As a breakfast, this is overcooked kippers, very crispy bacon, greasy home fries, and refried beans, served with pulpy orange juice.