Heated
Timothy Peers (2010)
Heated, another my apartment game, what’s there to say. I wish the author watched Get Lamp. He would
at least have an idea of how the community is going to receive a game like this. So you start off waking
up in bed with the alarm going off as the noise begins to grate on your nerves. You better turn that damn
thing off before your blood pressure hits the roof.
The goal here is to get to work early with the clock ticking away in the background. Because it’s timed, I
found myself restarting quite a bit until I had unlocked the beginning and then I started saving often. As
you go through the game doing certain things will raise your Heat (anger level), while others will cool it
off. It sounds like a neat concept, but I didn’t really see it in action with all the restarting I did. On
paper it looks like a great idea, but in practice people will do everything to get around it.
The game’s tech is solid, it’s built on I7, but it did come back with some strange responses at times - a
problem I’ve noticed with the latest version of Inform - and some of the verbs are limited on certain puzzles.
I also found a LOOK INSIDE bug. Under the game’s notes it says that looking and examining take no in-game
time. But looking inside stuff does. I question who actually tested this game. No one is credited.
And there you go, a my apartment game that’s going to go over like a lead balloon. I’m sure the author
thought he was being original, and that people would think his game is neat. But the real answer here is
he has probably played through very few modern era games and has no idea what the community is expecting.
I don’t think this game will do very well.