The Hours

That was a pretty cool story, though the implementation was a little lacking. It feels almost cinematic in its imagining of the plot and weaving together of plot threads. However, like a movie, we pretty much only have the one linear path to follow.

In particular, I found the scene in Eric II's office suite to be a little troubling. Once I'd discovered the plot to do away with the Eric I -- I'm labelling the Erics in terms of when we meet them in the narrative; technically, Eric II is the original and Eric I is a duplicate -- and the suggestion that our hero was slated for the same fate, it seemed as though our goal was to escape before Eric II returned with, presumably, a crack team of hero neutralisers. In hindsight, that is quite ridiculous: it makes more sense for Eric to fire our hero and quietly pick him off later, which is almost (but not quite) what happens. What I tried to do was to blow out the window by dropping the tick into the vase, and then try to hide under the desk -- except that there seemed to be no way to get the game to understand that I wanted to hide behind or under something, and the exploding tick resulted in death and endgame. As it turns out, I had only to wait for Eric II to return, but on my first playthrough, he simply never returned to the office. I think that part of the trigger for his return involves not only finding all the plotholes in his story, but also having the jewelry case in one's possession. This last object I'd placed on the desk because, having found it, that's what I would do. Once dropped, however, there was no way to pick it up again....

The ending of the game sets our hero up as an operative again in the corporation, with Eric III (or is it a pre-duplication Eric I?) for a (probable) sidekick, and a time-travelling nemesis in the form of our hero's duplicate, Omega. (It's the feud of Omega-Psi, and doesn't that sound like a great movie title?) Our hero has been once around the block and is cannier now; we know that he's on the alert and will be that much more resourceful. That sounds like a great game premise, although I think it would be a different sort of game. Part of the charm of this one, I find, is in not knowing what is going on, and discovering it all as one goes along. It's really an origin story, one which suggests certain directions that future chapters will take, and is interesting primarily because of that imagined potential. I do not know if a future chapter could live up to the promise here, but I'd like to see the author try to surprise me.

It's French toast, I think, with two slices of honeydew melon and baked beans. Dark roast coffee, no sugar or cream because some of us have lives too exciting to bother with these extras.