GAME: Can It Be All So Simple?
AUTHOR: TDS
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4 http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS:no
REVIEWED: 2nd October 2005
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/cibass.zip

TThis was my personal fave of all the games in the recent ADRIFT Summer Comp 2005, a decidedly dark horror where very little is as it seems. While not a perfect game by any means, it was an impressive debut. Of the five games entered in the Comp, it came a respectable third but I felt it should have done better.

Can It Be All So Simple? is a strange game. At times, it's hard to understand just what's going on, and even after finishing it, I'm still a little unsure about some aspects of it. It's a very linear game with minimal replay value, although to understand it all you'll probably need to replay it at least once. At times, the game seems to almost force the player along a set path, with the interactive side of things pushed to one side; this is used to make the storyline tighter and works to a degree, but at the same time the freedom to explore is what generally attracts people to interactive fiction. An example of this is used at the beginning when the player awakens in a dark room. The first four or five commands yield no proper responses; indeed, until the player is told he can see the bedroom, little can be achieved at all. This isn't a terrible thing in itself but it's annoying when you've tried certain commands and gotten nowhere with them, only to try them again a few moves later and achieve something.

Good points: well written. There's a nice little horror game here, complete with creepy monsters, things going bump in the middle of the night and weird goings on. It's also refreshing in a game by a newbie to find that items listed in the room description can be examined and interacted with just the way they should be. You need to really try to find the dreaded YOU SEE NO SUCH THING response displayed.

Bad points: it's… strange. Too strange in parts. The intro is notable more for its ever-changing colour scheme than for what it's saying. Unfortunately the colour scheme makes the text somewhat difficult to read – small red text on a dark background? Hmmm… The intro's also a little pretentious. It contains such lines as:

"How did the earth come to be?
Did an invisible hand in the sky form us in seven days?
Did we slowly evolve as a species through millions of years?
Or were we all a product of a cosmic explosion in space?"

And:

"I wonder in the end will it all make sense. I wonder does killing another person matter when it comes to looking at the big picture. I wonder is having prisons really such a good idea."

After that intro, I was expecting a different game than what followed. Or, at least, a game which bore some kind of semblance to the introduction. But I didn't see any such thing. If anything, the introduction seemed to be tacked on for no real reason and had little to do with the game itself.

There are a few flaws in the game but nothing that really ruins it for the player. I had problems in getting my neighbour, Debbie, to follow me at one point, until realising that she was following me but just wasn't included in the room description. There were a few lapses in logic as well: the player encounters monsters in his parents' bedroom yet his first reaction is to run and tell the next door neighbour instead of going for the police?

One point definitely in the game's favour is that it dispenses with the built in ADRIFT end game sequence and includes a custom one instead. Why is this a good idea? Simply: it gives the player the option of undoing his last command, or restarting the game or loading from a previous save, without the necessity of going through the tedious end game sequence that populates almost every other ADRIFT game. With a simple command, you're back playing the game. Why more people don't do this sort of thing I'll never know.

Can It Be All So Simple? is a very short game. Even taking the time to wander around every location in the game, pick up items, examine things, etc, you'll probably be through the entire thing in half an hour. But it's well worth playing all the same, even if the ending is a bit predictable.

6 out of 10