Gris et Jaune
Steve van Gaal (2010)
This game starts off rather strangely, a few disconnected images, your mouth filling up with dirt, and then it’s Grey. So I guess that it’s some sort of surreal game, and plunge in trying to figure out this strange world that I’m expecting to change from Grey to Yellow. But the game doesn’t unfold like that; it works its way back into reality, and opens up in a sprawling adventure that ran longer than the allotted play time.
The beginning really leaves you confused, and you really are in the dark here just trying to figure out who you are, where you are, and what you're suppose to be doing. With the surreal opening and the unsure footing, I felt lost. At least the game is pretty clear about what needs to get done in the beginning, but the one real puzzle I had problems with wasn’t properly clued, I had no idea how to get the Master of the house to move around, he just was never there. Now maybe if every time I walked into the room he would quickly walk out, then I would have not only felt that I could affect the environment, but that I had control over the puzzle too.
Eventually you piece together that you’re a zombie put together by this mad doctor, and the person that helped free you is a Voodoo priestess calling you to her. When you finally leave the doctors house the game starts to open up. There are some pretty interesting characters around, and I’m sure all sorts of stuff to get into, the walkthrough goes on for a while. But it took so much to figure out the simple things, who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing, that by the time I left the house over an hour had gone by. All of that seemed more like the set up to the story and it should have taken no more than 15 minutes.
So for me, that’s the biggest problem with the game. It’s massive. It’s a 623k .ulx file. It has no pictures in it and the game is writing in Inform 6.31, so there’s no bloat from the overhead of something like Inform 7. No, this thing is pretty big, and I didn’t think there was a reasonable possibility that I would finish the game. I enjoyed it, and I felt that I played enough to rate it. I scored it an 7.