Mothmen 1966

My wife and I had a lot of fun playing through the game together narriatoring different parts.

As far as games goes, this is very much a game-lite. I haven't... played?... many visual novels so this mode is new to me. Aesthetically, the game is rather nice. Kind of a souped up EGA but looking way better than anything did in that area owning to the higher resolution graphics. Audio is... well, it doesn't really fit. I don't remember a PC speaker ever sounding so good, the sounds this game makes are more akin to what I might have heard on an Atari 8bit. For the most part, you're doing nothing but reading, and enjoying high resolution EGA style graphics. Which as I've noted are pretty nice overall. Occasionally you're asked to make some sort of choice; a wrong choice often has game ending results (but with instant retry). And there are some mini games. Such mini games are as a rule absolutely awful to play - the games themselves aren't that bad, but the interface to play them must be a high contender for "Worst Way To Perform Input Ever". I have never come across a keyboard interface so bad - playing the Solitaire game was absolutely dreadful. Most of the narrative was interesting, seeing the viewpoints of the ongoing story from several different perspectives. Sometimes the writing felt ... off, I couldn't really pinpoint why. And the ending was... well, I didn't enjoy it. And it barely clarified anything. Perhaps the follow on games do? Other points. Saving the game broke the display every single time, so the images didn't appear and the text overlapped. By the time I got to chapter 5 I decided that such an obvious bug could have never had made it past QA, so assumed it was a "me" issue. I used command line arguments to force a 1920x1080 resolution (my primary monitor is 2560x1080) which solved the problem. Seems the game really doesn't like ultra-wide. I was also annoyed that the auto play functionality reset after every manual interaction. Conclusion, short and sweet - doesn't outstay its welcome. Will be interesting to check the follow on titles.

In theory, this is a short-but-sweet vintage-style computer game. The aesthetics (visuals, interface, sounds, etc.) are perfect. It has a neat take on the Motheman urban (well, rural) legend, but it also feels like you're watching a class '60s-era horror film -- complete with the token minority character & token nerdy character who spouts lectures about things the viewer/player couldn't possibly know. The problem really comes from how *modern* the characters inner monologues are. They feel like a 2020s urbanite's imagination of what these character should think & feel -- the hunky jock is traumatized by his drunk abusive father & is prone to outbursts of violence, the attractive blonde prefers her "liberated" female "friend" to her boyfriends and is contemplating an abortion (which, speaking of urban legends, would be carried out in an alley with a coat-hanger) and wishes she could just have a job... *yawn* It'd be laughably anachronistic if it weren't so tiresomely predictable. Really, the other protagonist (Holt) is the only one who's well-written and feels authentic.