Spamware

"Spamware is a short game. Approximately 30 to 60 minutes of playtime." Try 15 minutes. I played the demo of this during a recent Next Fest, and I was so disappointed to find out the full game is only about 5 minutes longer. It was only £3.39, but I thought I was getting more than what still feels like a demo that's barely fleshed out.

Short but sweet - A game that makes you ask the question: Should we have been creating CAPTCHAs to stem the tide of robotic spam? For what happens when the machines rise up? We now slave to solve CAPTCHAs for the capitalist machine. Stunning social commentary with light dark humor, 10/10 recommend.

Uh... it's quite dull. The game sets up the mechanics and then you do them approximately 5 times before [spoiler]you get the option to betray a guy and halve your sentence. You'd think something interesting would happen from that, yeah? Like you'd get backstabbed by either the prison or the guy. Nope! Your sentence gets halved and then ALSO all the gameplay is taken away 'cause "it's a trick actually" with no elaboration and then you sleep through a couple more days and the game is over.[/spoiler]. What? If that's how shallow it's gonna be, I'm not even gonna bother trying the other route lol. It's a real shame because there's actually some decent bones here but the overall game is EXTREMELY undercooked.

Too short, barely any reports (not even sure if it's in the double digits tbh) and there's as much story as there is flavor in flavored sparkling water. This has so much potential if it spent more time in the oven.

After I finished playing this game to get all the achievements (two playthroughs for a total of 36 minutes of playtime, four of which I spent getting up to go check on my laundry), I checked out the post mortem video on the developer's Youtube page. In that video, I found the developer explain that he didn't like writing the narrative or the dialogue of the game. Unfortunately, this is a type of game that absolutely needs narrative and dialogue, and as a result, what looked like a promising game ended up being the equivalent of an awkward social commentary followed by a wet fart. This should have just stayed in the drafts folder.

Not much to do in it. Didn't make me want to finish the game