Broken Legs
Sarah Morayati (2009)
There are some games that you get into and just love. They have imagery that captures your imagination, and enough interactivity to feel as if you're changing the world at least in some small way. And then there are ones that just rub you the wrong way. I have found games that have a lot of hard work and love put into them, as authors try to make them the best that they can be, but their setting or their subject matter puts me off so much that I don't even want to play them. And when you're playing through every game in the competition you can run across a few of these. For me, this year it was
Broken Legs.
To start off with, the game refers to you in third person, kind of reminding me of
Violet from last year, which was annoying again.
Ok, now that that's out of the way, the idea for the game is pretty cool. It takes place at an audition for the Bridger Conservatory, where you have to dispatching each of the other callbacks while waiting on the judges. But there doesn't seem to be a lot to interact with, just a few people you can talk to, with conversation trees running out after a few responses. Also, I didn't find a lot of conversation topics.
I don't think that the direction of the game was properly clued. It seems more like something that you would explore, piecing things together if you were willing to spend the time. And even though I got stuck early on, I was able to poke and prod at all sorts of stuff as the game came up with cool responses. You can see that the author has put a lot of time into this one. I'm sure it was a work of love.
But in the end this isn't a setting that grabs me at all, and I have no interest programming in a walthrough in order to see the game, so I can't fairly judge it. In truth I think that this might be another
Violet, a game that wasn't for me but turns out to be something that the community loves. All I can say is I scored it a 6. That's not bad considering.