A Texture game about depersonalization and confusion. I’ve posted a review of it on my blog.
I felt like I wanted to interface with the content more, but I was distracted by all the Texture. This is definitely quite the showpiece for the medium-- it shows off quite exhaustively all the things the platform is capable of. And for me, I do mean exhaustively. Click. Drag. Click. Drag. Click. Drag. Drag. Drag. I was impressed by the artistic effects and the way they implemented all of its unique features. But it really drove home to me the fact that I can’t stand Texture. Maybe it works better with a mouse or on a touchscreen, but I find it exhausting to work with on a laptop. A touchpad has a limited range of motion; it is often physically a struggle to drag the options all the way up. Plus, I find that the text on the buttons is often illegibly tiny-- a problem when you’re using them to display content as this game often did. Not to mention, with the vast amount of text that the options added to many screens, the main text got pretty damn tiny after a few drags too.
I feel like this game deserves more than to be a referendum on Texture, because there was interesting and very personal content that deserves examination and thought, but… I found that the structure stood between me and the content. Especially with the exhausting number of required drags on many of the screens. By the time I got to the text, I didn’t really care anymore what it said; I was just trying to figure out how many times I had to do this to let me progress. I’m not entirely sure why I finished the whole thing, some of the screens were starting to hurt my wrist. A sense of obligation to attempt to connect, maybe, even though I was clearly failing. And when you’re trying to describe a state of being so alien to most of us, any further barriers to understanding can be fatal.
I almost sometimes wish there were a Texture mode where you tapped a verb, the nouns highlight, you tap one of those. It’s still a good mobile touch interface without the dragging.