East Grove Hills
XYZ (2010)
East Grove Hills is a puzzleless game that centers on a lot of conversation topic menus. In it you play a young teenager that’s about to go through a big change in his life. It keeps you playing it because of the unanswered questions it sets up for itself, but then never delivers the answer. In the end becoming a lackluster game that I didn’t enjoy.
The game mostly centers on conversation menus, but I didn’t find the options taking the game in any new directions. It kind of reminded me of Bioware’s Dragon Age where you’re talking to people at times and option 2 is just hot air, so you might as well just go with number 1 all the way down. You’d think that a game solely built around conversation would allow the player a little bit of agency, the ability to influence things going around them, but the whole thing is on rails, and the player is more a passive spectator watching what’s going on. Very much like a book than a partaker of interactive fiction.
This game didn’t do it for me. There are no puzzles so I can’t take away any points for that, but a lot of my other criteria all fall in the middle of the road. And I couldn’t bring myself to give it a bonus point. I can’t recommend this game. I scored it a 6.