Tender Loving Care

I've played TLC years back and really enjoyed its special atmosphere and gameplay. There is something voyeuristic about the whole game, but it doesn't drift of into cheapness at any point. It tells a very interesting and tragic story about love, loss, seduction and weakness. The most interesting part about the game is the "psychological" profile it makes, judging your decisions during the game and how you answer questions. I just had to buy the re-release as soon as it appeared here - and that was a mistake in my case. I'd give this very unique experience five stars immediately - if it was not for the terrible and unworthy port of the game that is offered here. First: The video quality is terrible (especially if you know that there has been a high resolution DVD-version of the game). But it's not only the video quality, the gameplay itself has been extremely simplified to a degree it just doesn't give you the same feeling of exploration and immersion of the original game. There are absolutely ludicrous white frames over the important parts of every room, clearly showing you where you have to click (thus destroying the thrill of exploration and discovery). Even worse is the new movement "feature": Instead of clicking yourself step for step through the house, you have to open a map and "jump" from place to place. There is no feeling of exploration left. To sum it up: TLC is a great experience, but the port that is offered here isn't worth the money. I really hope GOG replaces this disgraceful version with the DVD-version.

TopcatPlayer's already excellent review gives players a good sense of what to expect, so I'm not going to repeat what's already been written. However, there are a couple of additional, technical things that prospective buyers should be aware of. First, despite this being an interactive movie, there are no subtitles available, so if you're hard of hearing or deaf this might not be playable for you. Second, audio levels are all over the place; the FMV sequences are at a lower volume than some of the audio sequences you'll click on later - so be warned when dialing that phone sex operator! Third, there is only one save file (although my game saved to the cloud easily). Finally, navigation can be cumbersome; even when using a map to walk around the house, unskippable POV cut scenes of your movement become repetitive, time consuming, and tedious. Additionally, backing out of some areas (such as the desk computer in the study) take you too far out, requiring you to then click on the sub area you were in to begin with. Overall, it's a decent, if slightly odd, experience (having characters refer to you as "the Viewer" and talk about your voyeuristic tendencies is just, plain, strange). Recommended while on sale.

When I bought the CD-Rom version in the 90s, I immediately took a liking to this... for lack of a better word: game. The story, the acting, the music, all of that was - and still is - top notch. This port, however, breaks the game. I don't mind the easier, touch-friendly navigation, but what I do mind is the game freezing, then having to quit, save, restart, load (there is only one save game slot), ending up right back at a freshly loaded frozen screen and having to play through hours of gameplay all over again. IF YOUR GAME FREEZES, DO NOT SAVE ON EXIT. The other broken thing that I really loved about the original game was that it provided you with a "psychological profile" based on your answers after the game. Gog.com boasts this feature in the advert, promises "a complete psychological analysis by the end of the movie" - which turns out to be untrue, unless the analysis gets saved somewhere and I don't know about it. After the credits roll, the game just resets to its start screen with absolutely no way to access its most interesting feature: Your analysis. I really hope whoever did the port will eventually fix this, because otherwise this is just a movie with pointless questionnaires in between.

You can call Tender Loving Care a lot of things, but uninteresting is not one of them. In it, you get to watch a bit of the movie as well as answer some psychological evaluation questions and your reactions to the last scene you've watched. This format is unique - you don't play a character, nor can you directly influence what happens, yet your responses do affect how things play out, including the ending. Unfortunately, there is no way of telling how your responses affect the story and with just one save slot, you'll have to start over to see any alternate scenes. The parts where you wander about in 3D recreations of the game settings are very much like Rob Landeros's previous 7th Guest, only it totally strips out the puzzles. You get some additional insight if you read some of the character diaries or files, but you won't miss much if you skip directly to the evaluation. It's essentially like DVD bonus content for a movie. The acting is probably some of the best the FMV genre has to offer, for what it's worth. The production value is on par with your average TV movie and the actors are okay. John Hurt surprisingly doesn't phone it in (a lot of these FMV games have one "name" actor during a drought period in their career) and I found myself just wanting to listen to his voiceover. The "adult" scenes aren't anything you wouldn't see on late night cable TV in the U.S. It's all serviceable erotic thriller cheese. This version of the game seems to be a port of the iOS version, which in turn was the DVD version reprogrammed to run a WebKit browser. As a result, the video is in terribly compressed WebM. And although it's supposed to be "uncensored" at least one scene is edited presumably to comply with App Store rules. Would've been great to just have the DVD ISO mounted in a DVD player. In the end, TLC is definitely an interesting little nugget that shows the intriguing direction FMV games could be taken in, as well as a study into why the genre ultimately failed.