Awake the Mighty Dread

With the new rule allowing updates to games over the course of the judging period, I feel hesitant to say much about the technical merits of a game. In this case, however, I think that I may be justified in saying a few words: this needs quite a lot more work before it can be considered a serviceable game. Too much is assumed as to the path that the player has taken; it is the old problem of having written a game around a specific, sequential walkthrough, without giving enough thought to possible deviations.

The story at the heart is interesting: it appears that our hero is a girl with an unhappy home life (to put it mildly) and that the surreal world in which she now finds herself is a dream. The goal appears to be to locate a person (a brother, I think?) from whom she has been separated. The girls possessions are intriguing: sleep and RAM, both of which appear to be containers. Is our hero, after all, an automaton? She does spend some time in a city of robots....

Still, as intriguing as all the imagery might be, I was still hampered by the poor implementation, the need to do things exactly as the author wrote in order to get anywhere -- a very specific form of "read the author's mind". As I progressed onwards, I found that I trusted the game less and less, to the point where I began to wonder if my own choices really mattered at all. That could be a delightfully meta commentary, taken in conjunction with the implications of the robot city and the RAM in our hero's possession, but somehow I doubt it.

Froot Loops and Lucky Charms, no milk. Mineral water.