Moon

Moon (contains spoilers)

There’s something a little smug about Moon’s apparent boundary pushing, and the way it constantly repeats the same processes and story structure over and over as our heroine Ikumi is forced to confront the most embarrassing demons and sexual perversions from her past in as a part of building up her mental strength in order to literally control a demon planted within her.  It’s a story that desperately wants to have its cake and eat it, with on the one hand its abundance of rape and humiliation (including child rape and attempted fratricide) and on the other shooting for a tone of humility, wistfulness and forgiveness.  At the end of the game Ikumi finally learns that she killed her own mother and the strength she gains from having learned to control her demons enables her to finally defeat the boss of FARGO, the organisation that’s abusing women in order to foster their inner strength in order to control them (yeah, that makes sense somehow…).  I didn’t quite get to the bottom of whether Ikumi actually did kill her mother or why, or whether this was a mental trick by the Moon )there’s an overall lack of clarity and care in the writing throughout this novel) but by this point I’d been subjected to so many scenes of forced mental tragedy that I felt the story had shot itself in as many feet as the morbidity had turned into complete turgidness.

There’s plenty of mileage in the idea of confronting your past, and the game also contains themes of family and childhood neglect which are potentially moving and quite brave for a game such as this.  It’s doubly disappointing, therefore, that the game doesn’t show any real restraint regarding its treatment of them.  It also doesn’t really find the perfect metaphorical device for expressing them – or at least it just doesn’t use it very well – as the cult FARGO and the mechanics around it seem so sketchy and over the top in its abuses as not to feel like a credible, solid piece of world-building.  I think it’s because the cult of FARGO has no real consistent personality and we mostly just see it expressed through a disembodied voice that speaks to Ikumi briefly during training., or that cults, in general, don’t strike one as operating like this, somehow – rather, they usually operate by bringing vulnerable, socially isolated persons together within a community as opposed to separating and destroying them.  Or maybe I just go back to the idea that this was all so morbid and self-congratulatory that I didn’t enjoy the assumptions the game made that it would push my boundaries every twenty minutes (or day in game time, of which there were 20).

This isn’t a terrible game, but it’s a game that never reaches heights that make it worth devoting a significant amount of time to.  The art is bland, the writing is bland, the characters barely exist outside of their shock value pasts (that is, beyond a rather nice opening segment in which the three heroines laugh and get to know one another, a rare moment of intimacy that doesn’t come across as forced or manipulative).  There are good moments but one has to slog through Ikumi’s daily routine with her to get to them – they mostly occur when that routine is broken and the plot, such as it is, propels itself forward and we learn more about the inner consciousness, the demons etc. (the boy in Ikumi’s room we eventually learn is a demon who plants his consciousness inside her – via sexual intercourse, of course! – but again we learn all too little about him and his kind to establish credible interest and his nightly interactions with Ikumi are so sparse and strange I can’t imagine why Ikumi even begins to trust him).  After the daily routine sections began to break up I desperately wanted Moon to turn into something great, but instead it only frustrated more as it progressed,  it’s unique enough to be interesting and of course the creators of this game went on to develop Key’s greatest hits which I’m anxious to experience.

Divi-Dead: Session Two

Divi-Dead

Pornography is particularly difficult to do persuasively because you both have to set up a credible scenario in which one guy sleeps with lots of different girls and remains an interesting character to relate to and you have to not slow down the narrative action too much with too many laborious sex scenes – pornographers inevitably fall into the trap of thinking that more is more with sex, but if you want a narrative to go the distance then actually much less goes a lot further.  Sex can get surprisingly dull quite quickly and like any narrative element is better teased out slowly.  Of course, punters are buying pornographic games for the sex so there’s a problem if you’re creatively minded.

They might not get everything right, but the designers of Divi-Dead negotiate this problem remarkably well.  I guess that sex and horror are generally felt to go together but the problem with this, for me, is that it’s hard to immerse oneself in a pleasurable fantasy world when bodies are being dismembered, or – all too frequently in hentai – people are being forced into sexual scenarios against their will.  Divi-Dead never really tries to make its sexual content all that pleasurable, preferring instead to use sex as a way of heightening tension and uncertainty around what is actually happening in the game and what the different roles of the characters are.  At the heart of the game is a quest for power and dominance by some of the students and supposed rape scenes that do occur are for the most part later turned on their head, reversing the assumption we – and the main character – make that one character is asserting a dominant masculine power when he’s actually the victim.  Women may still be reduced to sexual types here, but at least the titillation aspect is ultimately less sordid and unpalatable as I’ve seen in the slightly later Bible Black, a game whose premise seems modelled on this one.

Furthermore, the game-makers makers manage to often slip sex into the narrative in ways that are both tasteful and a little exciting.  I simple either/or between helping out a librarian or the school nurse, some tasteful erotic flirting from a fellow student or a longer romance with a potential childhood sweetheart all lead to sex scenes that feel appropriate and don’t outstay their welcome.  Perhaps it’s because they come at points that slow down a narrative that’s both fast paced and incredibly teasing in the way that it alludes to the murder, coercion, manipulation and horror that’s always in the background, with events so often seen and alluded to but the main character only stumbles across from time to time, whether it’s the whiff of the scent passed amongst the students, the discovery of a dead dog or the multitude of characters that slip quickly in and out of the frame  before telling you to get lost and mind your own business.  Until the final twists come at the very end, you’re never quite sure where you are with Divi-Dead and so the sex scenes almost act as a grounding point, giving you time to breathe and almost feeling as if something is understood.

Divi Dead must be one of the earliest games to use multiple routes that are unlocked according to the actions that you take.  The narrative strategy works particularly well here as different routes only reveal a certain portion of backstory, not only giving you reason to replay the game, but cleverly adding to that sense of being left in the dark, knowing that there’s always something more going on but that you can only weave one route through the confusion and never quite get all of the answers.  Essentially, in this game, one doesn’t explore different routes to experience different storylines, but to understand and experience the whole of one.  This is a great innovation but it’s also ties into Divi-Dead’s greatest flaws horribly, since other gameplay mechanics were thought out so terribly that to replay the game in order to fill out gaps in character and story are a massive chore.  For instance, I know that there’s a larger backstory surrounding the nurse character (through walkthroughs and a Spanish youtube vid) and I’m very keen to know about it, but not keen enough to slog through the process of walking from place to place to trigger particular story events in certain ways.  Of course, without the walkthrough I can only imagine that this gameplay is utterly unbearable, since it’s impossible to know when going to one location will trigger an event that will change your current route.  It’s a massive shame because it flattens what should have been one of Divi-Dead’s greatest triumphs.

I think that this game will ultimately go down as a could-have-been.  I was surprised by how much I found myself enjoying this macabre high school tale, that realistically stretched itself too wide and lacked focus and discipline to tell a straightforward scary horror story.  I enjoyed it because it did a lot well, regardless.  The work done by the art department is peerless and there’s more than enough atmosphere provided by the intricately detailed, often gruesome, visuals to make up for even the atrociously bad English translation of the text.  The situation and scenario itself is handled quite deftly and the introduction of a wide range of characters make the school feel like it has a life of its own and the ending, even with only one-route, felt quite exciting and climactic.  Divi-Dead doesn’t offer anything all that surprising (although my assumptions about the main character were fundamentally wrong) and it’s certainly not clever or astute, but it is chock full of atmosphere where it needs to be.  And it still basically works as a sex game, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet

Does the world really need yet another story exploring the differences between A.I and humans, wherein the creation, having been having been meticulously designed by humans for one specific purpose, turn out to be all too similar to their creators?  You could probably list pages of examples of this kind of story across the decades, from Asimov, Star Trek TNG to Chobits and so on.  Yet it turns out that this genre entry is by no means unwelcome, as production company Key – possibly the most famous brand in the Visual Novel world – have found a way to inject genuine emotion and pathos into proceedings, giving this old idea a fresh new spin and imbuing the whole with a number of other subtle and intelligent ideas that leave a shellshocked reader eventually both thinking and feeling deeply.  It’s a rare trick to pull off and writer Yuichi Suzumoto deserves the highest praise for doing so.

Our protagonist, a nameless Junker living in a war-torn future, lives a lonely life travelling from place to place, making ends meet on what he can scavenge.  When he chances across an old disused planetarium he also discovers a semblance of life in the form of Yumemi Hoshino, an android (or, gynoid)  abandoned and waiting to greet customers that will never arrive for a period of 30 years .  Initially the junker is simply irritated by her presence and constant stream of verbal diarrhoea, but he can’t convinve himself to move on before fixing up the rundown projection unit and watching the show that Yumemi is so anxious that he enjoy.

One of the most interesting things about the story lies in the development of the relationship between the two.  Yumemi never acts like anything but a programmed android and in terms of empathy she’s sorely lacking.  Would she pass a Turing test?  Probably not, because she can’t really think for herself outside of a strong desire to see customers in the Planetarium and to serve them to the best of her abilities, and she continually points that out or twists everything in the conversation back towards how wonderful the show is.  In some ways, as the Junker’s attachment for her grows it’s more akin to the developing bond between a human and their pet.  However, the meaning behind the growing relationship is perhaps more profound than that; Yumemi, as cute and adorable as a companion she may be, also represents a strong link to a faded, idyllic past; a past which for the Junker symbolises hope and opportunity.  Yumemi’s astral projections therefore paradoxically come to represent for the junker both a nostalgic window back into the past and a glimmer of hope for the future.  She provides a window to a past world where tacky space projections can fill halls full of gullible consumers but also a past where – just as now – people have hopes and dreams of a great human race expanding ever outwards and colonising galaxies.

That whimsical nostalgia is the kind one feels when visiting a popular retro-museum or exhibition to see old relics, scenes or perhaps childhood toys.  Still objects are often presented in cabinets with text explaining their purpose and one imagines, but is never quite able to immerse oneself in the reality of another life.  Yumemi, on the other hand, as a figure of enthusiasm, provides a constant reminder to our protagonist that this past was once very real, and also a constant reminder, as the power continues to fade and the reality of her eventual shutdown kicks in towards the end of the novel, that it’s a past that has tragically slipping out of sight with ever slimmer hopes of a return.  And – just as she did with the nostalgic past- in the present Yumemi manages to provide an image of hope for the future, showing the way to the stars and not allowing others to forget that there’s a potential for a much better life than the one the current world offers.

Planetarium manages to create a situation, then, that’s far more emotionally resonant than simply that of a man meeting an AI and discovering that there’s more to her personality than her programming.  That aspect is certainly present in this story, and executed superbly, as Yumemi ends up being as unable or unwilling to let go of the Junker as much as he can’t let go of her, eventually revealing a side to her programming that looks – if just a little – like a human emotion or desire.  But Key’s Visual Novel is thoughtful enough to use its Planetarium setting to even greater purpose, showing us readers that when it comes to simple stories about AI, robots or love, there’s a lot more on our horizons that we’ve yet to explore.

Divi-Dead: Session One

Halloween is swiftly approaching and I therefore decided to be seasonal and jump ahead slightly, past Ku-No and straight onto Divi-Dead, a horror visual novel around which there is relatively little fuss but a few positive noises coming from the few reviews I can find around the internet.  Given that there are fairly few full-on horror Visual Novels it’s a title that seems to make it onto recommended lists regardless.

Unfortunately, my initial enthusiasm for this title has quickly dwindled since the opening sections of Divi-Dead are a complete mess and there’s really very little, narratively, to help this game stand out from other eroge titles.  As a transfer student at a school (actually placed there by your uncle to find out the meaning behind some mysterious events, I think) you wander around from location to location meeting students, teachers, nurses and the like and having remarkably brief interactions that emphatically don’t lead me to want to know more.  After the in depth dialogue and options of Eve, there’s an unappealing sparseness to it all and I don’t want to know any more about these characters as a result.  There’s the spitting image of a girl you liked from childhood, a nurse who seems intent on displaying her massive cleavage to students and the sex-crazy slut who… yeah, you get the idea.  Yet, I’ve read that this does become significantly more interesting as the plot develops so I shall try to remain patient.  (Already we’ve got hints that our protagonist has a mysterious past and that there’s a mysterious scent being passed around that suggests black magic – it could entertain if I doesn’t become a device purely to facilitate sexual encounters as it does in Bible Black)

Yet, it turns out that the obnoxious click click click on areas of the map gameplay doesn’t further my desire to know more either and I quickly turned to a walkthrough so I’d know where to go in order to trigger the next event.  What’s the point in visiting 10 empty locations everytime you just triggered something?  Obviously we still haven’t taken the confident step of dispensing with the illusion of gameplay in-between your porn, so from a historical perspective it makes perfect sense that this hangover would be there, but sadly it’s really marring my desire to press through to the next scene as I keep turning to the walkthrough and back to facilitate gameplay.  What’s even weirder is that there seems to be no-way of knowing when you’re going to hit a scene that triggers a particular ending scenario, so without a walkthrough you’d be 100% in the dark as to unlocking alternative endings.  At the moment it’s difficult to determine if I’m going to want to do that – if the game allowed one to skip through dialogue without clicking around the map I might have the curiosity…

But there’s a saving grace so far.  The artwork is terrific and the drawn scenes are probably the most intricate and evocative I’ve seen so far.  And this includes the sex scenes – in particular a really nice dream sequence in which Ranmaru dreams he has rather filthy sex with our resident nymph Haruka, and this was surprising since I hadn’t expected to be drawn in by this aspect of the game.

A quick skim through the walkthrough tells me I’m about halfway through the meaningful choices to send me down a particular route (I’m going for Scenario A, purely because it’s methodical) but the ending section then looks roughly 3 times as long.  There’s plenty of room for this one to breathe, I sincerely hope that it does.

Eve: Burst Error – Final Thoughts

Eve Burst Error certainly isn’t a great novel in literary terms and it can’t be said to have pushed the boundaries of its literary genre influences.  I’d say the opposite in that it is quite meticulous in the way it sets up a bunch of stock characters and tropes that the player has no problem identifying, both from mystery novels and anime and in putting them all into one pot it doesn’t try to wow you with the originality of what comes out.  Everything about Eve Burst Error is set up to make you enjoy how much you identify with the game, and that includes how familiar and predictable and safe the numerous plot twists feel.  That is, when you meet Sweetie, or Puddin’ for the first time, you are in no doubt that they are going to become important down the road.  When the killing sprees happen, you know that the “Terror” is going to turn out to be someone you had no real reason to suspect.

And yet, playing the game doesn’t feel like such a safe experience, and that’s probably because as an early example of the Visual Novel, this is still an experience that’s entirely different from anything one has probably experienced before.  It’s likely that someone playing this in 1995 has never touched a visual novel, or at best experienced it through the hentai medium and not as a piece of literature with a complex structure and Eve Burst Error is at its height as it shows off just exactly what this form is capable of doing.  Because, aside from its technical mechanism, there’s one place where Eve strikes me as fairly unique and that’s in the way that it is paced and structured narratively and it’s through this exemplary and original pacing that Visual Novels seem to have found a voice,

And it’s this pacing that gives the narrative twists in Eve their unique power and makes it feel as if you’re not just reading another generic mystery novel (complete with Chandler-esque incomprehensible plot and motivation.  NB I love Chandler).  Unlike in a conventional novel, every scene in the game acts out like a stage play, heavy with dialogue.  Unlike a conventional stage play, there’s no urgency to push forward the drama.  Each scene, in itself isn’t burdened with doing anything beyond establishing a relationship or rapport between the two characters involved and the audience, and one finds oneself immersed in a long scene with throwaway dialogue and only one important piece of information that the reader will barely note, or forget.

My initial thought was that this shouldn’t and couldn’t work narratively, and that boredom would kick in a long time before the payoff.  And how does one even offer a payoff for this kind of story.  Strangely enough the payoff doesn’t emphasise the mystery aspects of the game – one is asked to guess and then treated to a long ending cut scene that expands on another characters motivations and feelings from another angle.  The final act of the main drama takes place on a boat.  There are further murders and action and everything feels as if it’s finally racing towards the end, and as much as I never felt that the storyline exceeded my expectations I felt more and more sucked in up until the end, to the point that I was refusing to go to bed.

I wouldn’t call Eve: Burst Error perfect.  I’ve highlighted a lot of faults with the game as I’ve played, both in terms of the mechanics and the puerility/inconsistency of a lot of the writing.  It is, however, a superb blending of old story elements with a new form and it deserves a lot of credit for that.  It’s rarely mentioned on lists of must-play VN’s these days which is probably understandable since it doesn’t seem to fit current trends, has its roots in straightforward hentai and looks/plays dated.  Let’s hope that love for it, however, doesn’t die.  I had fun with this.

(NB: This wrapping up doesn’t go too much into my thoughts and feelings re: characters in the game in order to keep it short.  My fault, mostly, for the 6 month gap in session reports.  Enough to say that I definitely had the hots for Marina, Natasha did nothing for me, Yayoi was too clingy, Kyoko was a cutey.  Puddin was just weird…  As a bi-male, unfortunately I felt uncatered for in the fanboy department and let’s face it, there’s some serious Harem going on here under the surface.  Also, having flicked through screenshots of the sex scenes that were removed from western releases, it occurs to me that the game works a lot better with the sex left in – for instance, there’s one plot point that changes sex to tickling and it loses a lot of impact.)

Eve: Burst Error – Session Two

The six month gap fails to represent how much I’m actually enjoying this game.  it does, however, represent a number of frustrations that I’ve been having with the format which led me to briefly move onto other things (I should not have done!).  Although, having moved on with the story the positives and negatives remain the same.  Kojiroh’s lechery is amusing but the swipes too broad to delineate an interesting character and the jokes about sex and tits get stale with repetition and don’t allow you to love the character.  Marina is repeatedly portrayed from a male perspective and whilst I’m not averse to lesbian titillation, the game’s narrative pull seems to warrant so much more – In other words, I’m frustrated stuck in-between a sex game and a tense thriller and it actually succeeds more in the domain of the latter both from a gameplay and narrative perspective.  But I’ll go into the narrative and characters hopefully a little more in my next post; right now I want to make a quick note as to why things got bogged down.

The dual character perspectives is a brilliant narrative device. From a gaming perspective it can really work to create mystery and tension.  As the two characters paths cross and as they meet similar characters it constantly leads you to wonder what’s going on elsewhere and how the stories link up.  Furthermore, I just played an interesting scene in which the two characters simultaneously try to hack into a computer network and they discover each other’s presence and then use each other to gain passwords for further access.  The scene involves constant switching between the two characters to slowly get further and further into it.

However, the  character switching is not always so successful and doesn’t segue well with another aspect of the game’s mechanics, namely, the try every option multiple times until you unlock the option that pushes the narrative forward.  In small doses, in the right situation, it’s a good system, but as the game opens up and there are more and more options it becomes very easy to miss one, especially when you have to search the same area 5 times to make progress.  It’s not intuitive.  Now, add in the fact that you don’t know if you’ve progressed to the right point in the opposite storyline and there’s a recipe for wandering around and around clicking on every option to a crazy level of tedium.  I unfortunately experienced multiple instances of these small frustration and found my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game marred.  I didn’t, however, intend to break for 6 months.  I’m now over 2/3rds into it, though, so hopefully my final thoughts won’t be too far off.

Eve: Burst Error – Session One

Although it’s been difficult finding a jumping on point, in English, that captures the turning point whereby adventure games began to turn into Visual Novels in a meaningful way, I think that it definitely shows in Eve that the easy flowing game-style of today hasn’t quite been hit upon yet.  There are two things about Eve that are really showing their age (neither of which I’m holding against the game from an enjoyment perspective).

1)  Gameplay isn’t about reading and then making a choice 10 -20 minutes down the road that will affect the outcome of the story.  Gameplay is a quasi-point and click style without the puzzles or the clicking.  After every selection/dialogue the player is asked to select from a menu including things like speak, think, move, examine etc. in order to bring up the next relevant piece of information or dialogue.  Presumably this is to keep the player constantly engaged and interacting with the game but unfortunately it just means one develops RSI from the unnecessary clicking one is asked to do.  The added frustration is that you often have to repeat selections to progress and it’s easy to end up in a situation where you think you ought to be selecting something else, resulting in you frantically clicking through every option to find the right one and re-reading text multiple times.  Alongside this issue Eve has a dual character scenario which allows you to complete as much as you can with one character before switching and playing the story with the other.  It’s a great idea but there’s no signal to say that you can’t progress any further, so you can find yourself moving aimlessly from one location to another, wondering if there’s anything to do that will trigger another section.

So far these are simply minor frustrations and completely understandable in a game from an era that was discovering and experimenting with new systems and new ways to tell stories.  It’s fair to say that this doesn’t quite work, but it doesn’t really detract from the compelling nature of the story thus far,

2) From what I understand Eve: Burst Error began its life as an eroge game. And only shifted focus when it was discovered that people thought the plot was strong enough and intriguing enough that it didn’t need the sex to sell.  Given that every other VN I can find from this period is a straightforward (and boring) Eroge, this seems like a fairly bold move , and fortunately a successful one.  However, whilst playing the game it’s easy to see the remnants of the pure porn buried within and characterisations of the primary characters are marred by the constant sexual asides which, whilst sometimes pretty amusing, are often out of place and frequently tiring.  A character flirting with a beautiful female reporter is one thing, but constant references to how obsessed he is with women, wanting to lick her face and so on are very off from a character perspective in what is otherwise – so far – a hard-boiled murder mystery.  I’m interested to see how attitudes towards sex change over time in these games.  So far it’s also not marring my enjoyment of the main story, but it’s a stylistic peculiarity that in hindsight could have been dispensed with.

Not a major plot point,

So that’s how the game plays, but what about the story?

What I love about the Visual Novel style is that it’s not in any hurry to get you anywhere.  Having just complained about the sexual asides, I will say that I love the fact that characters are introduced and their relationships fleshed out through dialogue and banter in a way that isn’t found in any other form.  Other forms (even doorstop fantasy sagas) attempt an economy of delivery, trying to get information across with every sentence or camera shot or line of dialogue.  Digressions usually have a point.  In the first scene of Eve we learn about the main character by looking around the room, chatting to the reporter about her camera and sex, and then eventually she’ll drop the detail that you were fired from the force for an indiscretion and struggling to make your own way as a PI.  Any narrative expert would call this uneconomical and badly designed, but actually I find that there’s something naturalistic and engrossing about it.  You never quite know when the story is going to move forward and shift into gear and I expect it will offer surprises when it does.

So far we have

Kojiroh’s Story

Kojiroh himself would be a better character if he weren’t such a random lech.  He’s no Philip Marlowe; he comes across as endearingly naïve but I’m not as yet sure this is the intent.  I suspect he’s going to prove to have some serious skills (as well as being attractive to the ladiez).  He does shift from being very confident in his dealings with the Detective Agency and Mr.Ko, to rather bashful around Glen or a waitress who slaps him about a lot.  I don’t know if I like him as a character but I like where the plot is going.

After his sexy reporter friend Kanomi a lead for a job (at what he sees as an exorbitant price), Kojiroh finds himself visiting one Mr.Ko, who tasks him with locating an Islamic painting (which turns out to be the size of a matchbook) which has perhaps been stolen from his premises.  There’s the weird proviso that the painting is not moved when it is found, no matter where, but the consolation that the reward will be great.  Mr.Ko has hired two others from a Detective agency, one Nikaido, a guy who is hated by Kojiroh and he shows his disdain every sentence, the other Yayoi who seems to be an ex-lover and so there’s a lot of tension and competition.  Kojiroh finds evidence of a burglary but it seems to him that the evidence was a little too obvious and wonders if this is a setup by Mr.Ko.

He then meets Glen in a hotel bar.  An ex-convict, he seems deferential towards Glen but wants him to help find leads.  Glen gives Kojiroh an illegal firearm.  It was around here that I got stuck and switched to Marina’s story.

Marina’s Story

Marina is some kind of international agent working for the government with “the Chief” (a nickname from a previous job) who she is friends with. There’s a lot of banter about the chief leaving his wife and the suggestion that the two of them might hook up in the future, although Marina seems interested in a female acquaintance she’s had past relations with.  She’s given the unenviable of playing bodyguard to Ambassador Mido’s daughter who is under threat from Middle-Eastern terrorists, since she’s not in the good books from her last mission.  As it stands, she’s just checked in for her first day of work at the school where the daughter attends.

No innuendo there!

I’ve been playing for a decent amount of time, and as mentioned before, the story is progressing relatively slowly; but that’s by no means a bad thing.  Despite the niggling faults of characterisation I’ve mentioned, it’s hard not to be intrigued as to where this is going – Kojiroh’s story already contains an interesting mystery which can only deepen as we meet more characters and situations surrounding it.  Marina’s has yet to take off and promises to be more of an action-oriented thrill ride.  It’s also a very funny story, and whilst a lot of the sexual humour is a little over the top, there have also been numerous interactions that have made me laugh out loud, particularly when one character insults another for various reasons.  There are also these bizarre recurring options such as “examining shrubberies” and sitting in bizarre ways in the middle of the street.  You can look at the ceiling or crawl on all fours under your bosses desk for no obvious reason.  The intent is just to make you smile, and it usually works.  Some may not enjoy the constant 4^th wall breaking but in a long drawn out game where one takes frequent breaks away from the PC for everyday life, I think it’s appropriate in a way that it maybe wouldn’t be in a movie or TV show.

A very enjoyable experience so far.  What’s telling is that I’m eagerly anticipating getting back to it and finding out where the story goes from here.