Blackout: The Darkest Night

Badly written as a horror VN. Wastes too much time on animation. Starts with cold open, only to lose pacing with the flashback retrospection and puzzle. Sorry, I already recognize tricks authors used to extend the game length. Quick spotlights on the fragments of the one picture, only to repeat showing of the full picture? Slow showing of line-by-line fluff text? Nope, no dice. I do not have time for a VN that does not value my time to provide meaningful narrative.

The art is really well done, and the writing is alright - the descriptions and atmosphere setting are pretty good, but some of the dialogue isn't. I did run into some a few non-sequitur scenes during my gameplay, unfortunately, a problem that is all too common in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style games. None of those were particularly bad, but they do break the immersion a bit. Still, easy to recommend. It's a short but entertaining adventure, and one could easily play it more than once to see missed details and routes - I most likely will do, as I'm curious about at least one other possible ending.

I was enjoying this quite a bit at first. The fragmented-memory structure, jigsaw-style flashbacks and general presentation made the story feel like something I had to actively reconstruct, which suited the premise really well. Unfortunately, the branching eventually broke my trust in the narrative. In my playthrough, I went to the hospital, spoke to the doctor friend, and was told that my wife was in a coma. I then went home, slept, and received a phone call from the same doctor asking where I had been for the past four days, speaking as though our hospital conversation had never happened. The protagonist did not acknowledge this contradiction at all. Shortly afterwards, the game suddenly moved into an epilogue where my wife was apparently fine again. I understand that the game is deliberately nonlinear and that different choices can change the order of locations and lead to different endings. That is not the problem. In a story built around memory loss and fragmented chronology, continuity matters even more than usual. If the game presents a contradiction, the player needs to know whether it is an intentional part of the mystery or whether the branching logic has simply fail…

Unusual and compelling narrative. Several different ending and you'll have to replay with different choices to get to the end.

You know what? I am going to not recommend this. Writing is ok, atmosphere ok, but it is very slow to play - text and picture reveals take forever and if you try to speed it up you can accidentally click a decision and lock yourself into moving forward. It also has boring jigsaw puzzles you need to complete to progress the story (though maybe you can skip them, I noticed I could skip after finishing the first time. Was that option always there, or only for subsequent replays?). I also felt like my decisions seemed to just lead me round and round to the same place (after trying to replay it a couple times and seeing most options seemed to be fluff that would lead back to the main path). There didn't seem to be much logic to when a decision would help or hurt me. And in the end I didn't find out what my 'Blackout' was about, why I had it, or why these events played out! I have hints, but no real conclusion. If that info is in here, I ran out of patience before unlocking it. Unsatisfying! That said I only got one ending even though I tried to replay with different choices. Not sure what paths lead to others, because as I said, my choices seemed to have little impact.

Very nice little adventure game. Could have used a few more soundtracks and the implementation of the story branches was a bit clumsy: in some playthroughs I received the same flashbacks more then one time and Will introduced himself more then once if I recall correctly. But overall it was fun wo experiment with the different outcomes. I hope you will make more horror themed choose your own adventure games in the futures