I played the pre-order preview for Cinders, a beautiful visual novel based on the Cinderella fairytale. It’s a well refined game, distinctly built on a unique engine rather than the standard Ren’Py engine, but it’s the quality of the writing, with a huge number of delayed choice consequences and heavy content pruning, that really makes it for me.

My problem… is that I’ll probably prefer this demo to the real game. I probably won’t find all of its hidden gems, and on future plays I might even just start to see it as a tree traversal exercise than the compelling story it tells. And also, my expectations are really damn high right now.

I could neither recommend it, nor avoid talking about it at this point.

My next post will be better.

This game occupied me for much longer than it should have, especially at such a late point in the semester. Generally, these life simulations, anything from Kudos, to The Sims to a 15 minute demo of New York Nights, always seem to have this effect on me.

I guess I’m just fascinated by the idea of modelling life on a bunch of numbers, even though it’s way more fine-grained than that. Still, Alter Ego’s intrinsic traits seem to work really well (though whether you could max out intellect in your teenage years is to question). That it’s still relevant 30 years later is an obvious indicator of its accuracy.

I really do look at talented people in terms of Gladwell’s hours of deliberate practice and relationships in terms of Covey’s trust bank, but I dunno… is it really right to base things like love and friendships in any sort of numerical form?

But that’s me being evasive and thinking about game systems, avoiding writing about my actual life. And the overall feeling about life that I get from Alter Ego is regret…

My next post will be better.