Grimm's Godfather

This was really lightweight. It's a retelling of the fairy-tale story of the man whose godparent (godfather in most cases, I think, but godmother in the first version I read) is Death. The story comes with three instances where a character must make a decision: once to choose a godparent, and twice to save someone whom the godparent has marked for death. The point of the game is to see what happens when different choices are made at these critical points.

I'm afraid it doesn't work very well.

In the first place, the game is very lightweight. The whole of the text for any one playthrough probably amounts to less than this very review, so descriptions are perfunctory if they even appear, and characterisation is one-dimensional at best. The author's command of English does not appear to be very good, so the quality of the text suffers even more.

Then there's the theology. Or, perhaps I should say, the culture clash. In the original story, the first person to offer to stand as godfather to the hero is God Himself, but the hero's father turns him down because he thinks God favours the rich at the expense of the poor. The hero's father is himself a poor man, and we understand that he's arguing from a limited perspective. The author has no such understanding, and takes the father's argument at face value, portraying God in this story as requiring the hero to heal only the rich. There's no theological debate here: it really looks as if the author thinks that this is the character portrayed in the original story. He is, I think, completely unfamiliar with any sort of theology attached to the monotheistic Judeo-Christian God.

So the author is working with a language he doesn't grasp very well, to depict a culture he doesn't understand. There's really too little of the game to really see what the author's strengths might be. If I were to offer any advice, it would be to begin with something he knows intimately. If the author is more comfortable in a language other than English, perhaps he should try writing in that. I'm not able to evaluate anything in a language other than English, but I'm sure there are people out there who can, and the use of a more familiar language might open the author up to a more substantial work, something than can bear more evaluation.

It's like a one-eighth wedge of an English muffin, with a warm mug of extra-sweet Horlicks. Not much to speak of, that's not how you slice an English muffin, and English muffins aren't generally found in England anyway; but there is a certain childish appeal in it, I suppose.