Left on Read

Not really bad, just kind of boring honestly

I like "UI" games like Emily is Away but this one was pretty simple and a bit uninspired. It feels like a gimmick somebody coded up to capitalize on the pandemic. The platforming makes no real sense as a procedural representation of conversation. Falling off the message blocks produces no real consequence. The characters are flat, and the choices seem simple. Lots of eye rolls are to be had at the impossible final achievement. I read through all 46 pages of the Steam discussion out of curiosity and the "clues" seem to be almost entirely unrelated to the game's characters and narrative, and involved using cryptography to scrape websites that no longer exist in order to hunt down songs you've probably never heard of. When the rest of the game is viewed with the understanding that the "hardest" part is stitching together a bunch of puzzles that aren't really puzzles, the entire experience is realized as pretty pretentious. Left on Read is what happens when programmers who aren't game designers try to make a game.

ok game, annoying impossible achievement

fun to play

good

7/10 Manages to capture the complexity surrounding human connection during quarantine.