A game about a dead woman, a live orphan, and the legal grey area of resurrection.
www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gdebree/Maryam-1.0-all.zip
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A game about a dead woman, a live orphan, and the legal grey area of resurrection.
www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gdebree/Maryam-1.0-all.zip
Comments are closed.
Visually consistent and stylistically fitting, given the conflict in the narrative. At first playthrough, I didn’t realize that the text I was entering was my name, so I commented “bummer” in reply to the situation and became Evaluator bummer. My character is stiff and professional, there’s no room for my own introspection. I have to keep my emotional thoughts to myself as I play, something I think CPS workers do have to handle on their jobs. Maybe pushing that language to illustrate that gap could be a direction to pursue. I enjoyed to change of language between the two interview subjects, especially the flatness of the child’s responses and how hard it is to get information out of them (I too behaved this way during my parents’ marriage counseling.) I preferred to think of the NOTE at the end of the form as my own introspection, not something at actually appeared on the form, as this is the only inner thought my character had, and it was satisfying as well as expositional.
I’m sure you can produce better visuals but great scenario and great proof of concept. I like the possibility of switching the interviewee but maybe some new questions can be unlocked as a result of certain branches. Right now you basically read through all the content and make a decision. If a crime is revealed in act 2 there should be at least a hint in act 1. It’s close to present an ethically challenging choice but it should be more of a dilemma, what are the consequences of rejecting the robot?
Very interesting idea to explore, good job expanding on the details and thinking things through. Illustrations were great. There was a lot of dialog which really fleshed in the story. There were several minor typos/grammar/punctuation issues, but those are easily fixed. There was some of this already, but I think the characters could be expanded to have more emotions and make the dialog more interesting and varied. For example, if you reject the family, right now they both just accept it — maybe have them argue against it? If you accept them, they both give roughly a curt “Thank you”, but it seems like we might expect more emotion and happiness.
Overall a fun game and I enjoyed playing it!
I would have liked more rewards for exploring all the options – i.e. after asking a certain question to Anna, you unlock a new question for Maryam. (There might have been this, but I didn’t see it?) I liked the visuals despite the lack of facial expressions.
In terms of visuals, I’m sold on Maryam/the robot, but not much else. Narratively, though, I’m super into it. There’s a lot to do, and a lot of worldbuilding going on. My only gripe is that the endings are so lackluster. Why is the girl so nonplussed? What are her feelings towards Maryam? She came across as weirdly apathetic for someone whose life is literally at stake. It just seemed like there were a lot of secrets and layers that I didn’t get to really delve into, despite investigating literally every possible option. This story and its characters are calling for an emotional break, where one or both of them open up and get emotional, and I really felt the lack when I played it through.