A game not set in a collapsed cave, or on board a spaceship. Very good sign.
Spoilers follow
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At last, a 2009 competition game worthy of two hours of play. In this game, you play a girl who just flubbed her auditions for a performing arts college, and now must sabotage the other five applicants in order to salvage her chance to be accepted into the program.
The prose is sharply written, and the puzzles are engaging (though difficult). There is even a hint-system which is so well integrated into the game, that you won’t have to break character to use it. But even with the hints (which are certainly not explicit) I had only eliminated one of the other applicants at the end of two hours (and have a strong notion about what I need to do to eliminate two others.)
There are some occasional programming errors. Most serious, I thought, was that when I examined the papers in the small closet while Rosanna doing her audition, she STILL came back to the room and took them from me. Wouldn’t the judges notice her absence? Other coding errors make it seem like the puzzle with Alexandra has been solved, when actually it was not.
But those errors aside, this is a quality game, and will likely finish in the top third of the competition.
