Rating Curve

Awful level, I don’t understand why people care so much about it.

I hate this level both for being the precursor to flow gameplay and for making people think it’s acceptable to use invisible fixes in their gameplay.

I quit this “””game””” after 5 minutes because the controls were legitimately unbearable. Given that this seems to be a point and click adventure game it might legitimately have been easier to just make this in a real game engine.

Even judging this level as not being a GD level, I think it fails. The only thing to really keep me there is the writing, and that was at best standard and not even close to on par with even an average book. The "tap to redirect" thing also added nothing to the level for me, it never felt like it did anything which is probably the point, that "you" are putting off the conversation in some way, but I had literally no investment in it one way or the other. I felt nothing for this character. Part of that is because most of what the dad says is obscured. PAHC says that you're meant to decipher it yourself, but I don't really understand what this adds to the message. The gimmick was most effective when you gave simple "yes" or "no" answers to big long conversations, as if to indicate that you've totally tuned out. That it's meant to be a representation of that is pretty clear in the script itself, where the dad just keeps asking if you're listening. The issue here is that making me decipher it is totally antithetical to the point being made. The character is tuning out what the dad says but as an audience I DON'T want it to be tuned out, and so there's a fundamental misalignment between what I'm being told I want by the level and what I actually do want as a viewer. For this to work I would need to be the one that wants to tune out the conversation, in fact I am the perfect person to have that trick played on them because I'm super impatient with this sort of thing. Like I'm imagining an alternative version of this level where I could hold down to go faster, and I go in, expecting it to be an auto level, only to start making it move faster and then be confronted with the ability to respond and not know what the fuck was just said. As is, I'm instead being forced to sit through it, and I want nothing more than for it to just get a move one.

And all that is just judging it as something other than a GD level. Judged as a GD level, I just find this concept fundamentally uninteresting. The GD editor is fundamentally limited in how well it can do conversation-based games like this. A simple point-and-click adventure game made in a real game engine would be so much better than this. This isn't even really a GD level, it just happens to use the GD editor as a means to make a different piece of art, one which isn't that good on its own merits and is even worse when considered as a level of a video game.

Just play totally legit level instead

Basically just a worse version of killbot

The song alone makes this level completely unbearable