Highlands, Deep Waters

I enjoyed this game very much, and personally finished it the second time I played it. I’ve noticed that the only reviews from people who didn’t like it kept on mentioning how they would repeatedly die at the same spot. That is what made me stop playing the first time I downloaded. This time, however, I kept playing after that part and found the entire story to be thrilling. I wish people would take a deep breath and realize that it’s only part of the story. I can imagine how frustrating those reviews are. Anyway, it was fantastic, and I expect to find myself playing through it a few more times.

Really wanted to like this game. I haven’t seen a good horror game done in ChoiceScript yet, and this story was clearly a labor of love by7 someone who knows how to write.... ....unfortunately, writing, by itself, does not a good game make. The problem with this story is that the main character gets to a decision point where the player has to make the right choice otherwise end up with a permanent game over. There’s no save point, there’s no going back, it’s replay the entire game to get to this point again, and hope you make the right choice. I’ve played it through three times and, apparently, have not made the right choice (or series of choices?) to make it through to an optimal ending. As it is, restarting every single time is draining my patience.... If this game had the ability to restore to a previous save point (as other ChoiceScript games do,) this would be far less of an issue. As it is, unfortunately, this isn’t even a three star game. I guess the developers tried to get around this issue by making the entire first part of the story skippable....okay, great, but what does that mean? The choices made in the first half of the game don’t matter? In other games, I enjoy replaying/rereading stuff because I can see that my decisions have an impact on how the story progresses. Here, other than changing a few words here and there, they really don’t. I hate to be so critical, because I really did enjoy the writing. In fact, I would pay to read a horror story by this team...because it feels like this work would’ve been more successful as a story than an interactive game.

I’ve played many CoG/Hosted Games. It was a treat to play one which had a very different feel to it compared with others I’ve played. I don’t want to give anything away, but the act of investigating the mystery changes your character’s nature. Your choices influence what happens, but there is less emphasis on building stats and more emphasis on consequences of your decisions. There are many endings. I’ve only done one play-through so far, so I don’t know how different the “forks” in the story will be. It’s a long game. This was fun in that I got many hours of enjoyable play. It may be a hindrance if I want to get all the endings.