Gamebook Edgar A. Poe: The Oval Portrait

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Great music and short audiobook. Can be completed in half an hour. 1 full hour for acquiring all achievements.

Gamebook Edgar A. Poe: The Oval Portrait is a compact and unconventional piece of interactive storytelling that adapts Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale through narration, atmosphere, sound, and limited player participation. Rather than turning the source material into a conventional adventure filled with puzzles and explorable environments, the game focuses on creating the sensation of stepping into a narrated gothic story. Developed and published by The Midworld, it is best approached as an experimental gamebook and audio experience where imagination is just as important as what appears on the screen. The narrative naturally revolves around the mysterious oval portrait at the heart of Poe’s original story. Themes of artistic obsession, beauty, devotion, mortality, and the destructive pursuit of perfection remain central to the experience. Instead of heavily expanding or rewriting the material, the adaptation concentrates on presenting the story in a more immersive form. This restraint works reasonably well because the strength of The Oval Portrait has always been its unsettling implications rather than complicated plotting. Players familiar with Poe’s writing will recognize the und…

It's free and has some achievements. A normal audiobook is probably a better way to experience Poe's work, but this is acceptable.

I just couldn't continue. I love E.A. Poe but this did not lend anything to, and in fact took away from, my enjoyment of the story. Hearing only what is spoken or thought with no world-building beyond the clopping of hooves, sounds of scuffle, etc removed details my mind could have worked off of, not to mention the confusion of when to tap the space bar (and having to at all), the random notes of 'cut scene', and all the mispronunciations. I was excited to find this and highly disappointed.

Gamebook Edgar A. Poe: The Oval Portrait is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. Departing from the usual garbage e-book/visual novel non-game fan-fiction spam that infests Steam, this one is an audiobook. That changes... uh... nothing. Audiobooks aren't games, either. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that exper…