GAME: Time In The Dark
AUTHOR: Purple Dragon
PLATFORM: Inform http://www.inform-fiction.org/
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 29th May 2007
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://newsletter.aifcommunity.org/minicomp2007.zip

This one seemed a little bland. It starts without any direction as to what needs doing and I spent some time just wandering from place to place looking for a way to trigger the next series of events and wishing the game would give me some more obvious pointers. Fortunately the small number of locations work to the game's advantage: with so little room to explore, it doesn't take long to find what you need to do to start things moving. It's still annoying though.

The blindness angle was interesting, though certainly could have been handled better. Default error messages - YOU CAN'T SEE ANY SUCH THING - should have been re-worded to reflect the fact that the player can't see *anything*.

Neither of the game's NPCs* came across as particularly believable. There's your girlfriend, Jess, who has all the genuineness of a starlet in a porn film (and even shouts out authentic porn star phrases during sex) and a detective who comes to interview you who seems to be permanently reading from the auto cue.

* I had the impression that it was a requirement of the minicomp that only one NPC was present, but clearly not.

Not a bad little game overall but not one I really cared for.

Arousal: about half and half.