This is perhaps the best-suited game for Kindle I have seen yet.
I expected this to be more of a straight up choose your own adventure type book, but it is more complex than that. It is like a mashup between a comic book, those old text interactive fiction games, and a choose your own adventure book. Not only can you choose what to do, you can make a lot of choices about who you talk to and what you say. There are even combat sequences (sort of)!
Dusk World begins with a small amount of back story, all presented with great-looking hand-drawn comic-style graphics. The story is set in a world where superheroes and supervillans are all over the place, and your character has a history with both. Quickly, you are dropped in a position of talking to other villains and heroes to work your way out of a prison, while trying to unravel a mystery about your past.
*The Good*
-Perfect fit for kindle. Mix of reading and game-playing feels like a modern choose your own adventure book.
-Dark, comic-style graphics look great!
-More complex choices than a choose your own adventure book. You can choose what to say to people, and fairly freely roam around an area and do things in not necessarily a prescribed linear order.
-"Combat" sequences that entail typing a series of characters (these can be skipped if necessary).
-Mysterious, comic-booky story. If you like comic-book stuff, you will like it. If not, you might still like it.
-Well designed, easy to use interface. Opening story helps you with how to play, no need to read instructions.
*The Bad*
-Kind of linear--choices often don't matter in dialog, and despite the fact that you can roam around freely a lot, much of what you do doesn't matter except triggering the couple actions necessary to progress the story.
-Can be a bit boring/repetitive at times. Since many actions don't have much consequence, you can often just run through each menu option, trying everything until something works or you get what you want.
-Page turn times a bit slower than in books due to graphics.
As the story progresses, your actions do take on more significance, and the storyline does diverge different ways depending on what you do. You unlock different comic book pages depending on your actions, and can view the finished comics when you complete the game. It's neat to see this kind of interactive story on the Kindle. It feels like a natural extension of the Kindle reading experience in a way that most of the other games don't. The story itself is not something I would typically be reading, but I still found it generally fun (note though that the language and some content make it clear that this isn't really designed for children), and the wealth of content and illustrations make it worth the price to me. Dusk World
I thought that this was a clever concept for the monochromatic Kindle platform. It take a kind of Frank Miller a la "black and white" comic film noir design, and makes it into a "Choose Your Own Adventure" interactive graphic novel. The super hero characters and setting was very much in the same vein as "The Watchmen" if a bit less grim. The interactive game mechanics work fairly well in giving you a number of choices to make along to way to unraveling an albeit very light mystery, which brings me to it's weak points.
While I thought the concept was great and very fitting to the inherent limitations of the Kindle platform, the actual adventure took me less than a total of 3 hours to complete. It is only about 4 chapters long and seemed over before it began. The mystery itself was not much of one really in the end. Overall, it seemed that it should be much, much longer adventure. Furthermore, the "choose you path" style of play belies that your choices will impact the outcome. However, as far as I could tell, you could circle back in just about any conversation and try a different set of prompts. There seemed to be maybe 3 choices in the game that impacted the final outcome, but all in all, did not make much of a difference in the final story.
This is sad. At least with the classic "Choose Your Own Adventure" paperbacks of my childhood, you could read and re-read and experience wildly different outcomes. Indeed, getting to a satisfactory ending was quite a challenge in many of those storybook adventures. Not so with this too slim adventure.
So, I would have given this 5 stars if the story had been much longer and richer, and the choices actually led to various dead-ends providing a challenging mystery to unravel. Ultimately, this seems more of a proof of concept than a satisfactory interactive adventure.
Keep trying ...
This game is now my favorite kindle game ever.
Though it is a bit too superhero like for my liking I have enjoyed this more than any other kindle game. However, this game is not without its flaws. There are many minor spelling errors and, occasionaly in some battle portions the pattern does not show up.
I also would not reccomend this book/game to anyone under the age of 11 becuase of some language and content that could be considered inaproppriate.
Overall I greatly enjoyed this book/game and hope many like it come, along with a lower price point and some more sword and sorcery type book/games.
I bought this based on the great reviews it got. I was excited to try this sort of choose your own adventure story. What I found is this is NOT a choose you own adventure book. Let me repeat that THIS IS NOT a choose your own adventure book. The fun of Choose your own adventure type books is multiple story arcs that you get to choose. Yes you are given choices here, but they don't actually matter, there is only 1 story arc and the choices are just your "investigating" to figure out what that story arc is. If you interact with a character you are given the option of asking 2 or 3 different things...it doesn't matter which you choose because you'll be forced to choose the other options as well to progress the story. Want to approach a situation differently? Nope only 1 way to do it. Want to do something really obvious that your character might do? Nope you can't only 1 way to do things. - Tales Of Intrigue - Adam Lambert - Spy Stories - Amazon Digital Services'
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