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Oh, Human Reviews
Author: Abbi Park
Date: 2008
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by revgiblet
I guessed wrong...again.
AWARD: The "Carrot, Not A Stick" Award
Hmmm, this game starts with the player trapped in a small dark room. There is a
circle of light nearby. The title of the game is Oh, Human. I guessed
this one right away. I was waiting to be born, and I was going to play through
the first few moments of a child's birth. Could it be any more obvious?
But no! It turns out that I am a regular adult and am being put through my
paces in some kind of scientific test. The purpose remains deliberately vague
and, because the core of the game is constrained by the restrictions of the
competition, I thought that it was all the better for it. I haven't messed
about with crates this much since I played the original Half-Life, so I
liked to imagine that this was all part of some experiment at Black Mesa -
though I doubt that the author had that in mind.
The author's other game was Business as Usual, and Oh, Human was
my favourite of the two. Although the puzzles were fairly simple (though I got
stuck because it is possible to 'enter hole' when you visit room one for the
second time, and therefore end up in room two again instead of progressing to
the next stage of the game) and the story virtually non-existant (though I felt
it hinted at more than one possible ending, which I didn't find anyway) there
was still a nice sense of progression and purpose to the game. The comments by
the unseen observer provided probably the most obvious 'carrot' of the games
that I played, and it was nice to have a fairly clear objective in front of me.
A lot of the other games relied on more esoteric motivation (which is fine,
especially if it's the promise of more story nuggets) and it made a nice change
of pace. At least there wasn't anyone coming in and moving all the crates
around so that I couldn't find them. Though once I took one of the crates, but
it was still listed in the room description.
The final thing to add to this review is that this was the second entry from the
competition organiser herself. Not only has she gone to the trouble of running
a competition, she has provided two of the entries. I think it's clear that
this competition can clearly be labeled a success. So now I'm going to break a
convention that I decided on when I began writing these reviews - I'm going to
refer to the game author by name. Well done Abbi, and thanks.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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