Intelmission

A choice-based game about an espionage mission. I’ve posted a review of it on my blog here.

I enjoyed it, but I do tend to care more about the fiction bit than the interactive bit. I would note that there was an option in the settings menu to speed up the text-- quite a number of speeds, actually. Nice, especially in subsequent playthroughs. So if the dialogue speed rubbed you the wrong way to that extent, it might be worth giving it one more try with the faster text. Though, I do remember the scrollback being way shorter than I’d have liked (I’m not sure you could get off the current screen of text, even-- at the very least, there were definitely discrete segments you couldn’t backtrack from). That was a problem.

I also wasn’t thrilled with the forced biphobia in the ‘vampires’ branch. It seemed very… unsubtle. Rather dated. And you couldn’t choose to have a different outlook or to avoid the topic once it came up. I also found that the last sequence was hard to direct the way I wanted it to go, though whether or not that is a flaw is highly debatable. A little bit more of an epilogue might have been nice. At any rate, I enjoyed it enough to play a couple times, though I’m still wondering about where a couple of the other hidden conversations and outcomes might be found. I feel like the conversation system had an interesting dynamic-- wait long enough, and you can skip topics altogether. (Though that damn vampires topic lingered to the end of the playthrough… no, dammit, I have seen that once and I refuse to go through it again…)