A Quiet Evening at Home
Anonymous (2010)
A Quiet Evening at Home, maybe it should be subtitled: How Not to Write a Game. In it you start off coming home from another boring day at work. Doesn’t sound awe-inspiring to me, and it isn’t. It’s another my apartment game only this time it’s a my house game with rooms that are barely implemented and puzzles that aren’t even clued.
When the game starts off you have to go to the bathroom. Fine enough, you can at least say it has a bit of direction. I think more games need that. But the constant daemon ticking away in the background that says, "Gotta go! Gotta go!" gets old real quick. I knew that I needed to go right after reading the opening paragraph; you don’t need to beat me over the head with it. The best solution for this is doing it once every four or five turns. Prodding the player if they haven’t done it, but not overdoing it.
The game isn't clued at all and you'll have to turn to the walkthrough to get around the author's ridicules puzzles. Why I would have to put the hamster in the ball and let him go in the office is beyond me. It’s like the author said, oh, there isn’t much here, let’s just throw in this puzzle from left field. It doesn’t feel like it fits seamlessly into the game, it feels contrived. There's even a point where you need to go a certain direction and it's not listed in the room description and trying to go in any other direction gives you a useless response like, you just want to go home. This sort of misleading will confuse the player causing them to turn to the walkthrough. And once you turn to a walkthrough in a game like this, it’s really hard to look away.
In the end the game felt completely pointless. There’s no story here, you’re really just going through the motions of a boring life that has no spice. Even the scenario feels like it’s missing something, like there should be more to do that just cook up some soup and take out the garbage. But then you get all types of games during the competition. I scored this one a 2.