Non-Review: Inherent Evil: The Haunted Hotel

Written by Andrew Plotkin

Sorry.

Every time I start writing a game review, I swear to myself I'll keep it short. Perhaps you swear the same thing. Well, this time you get your wish. This isn't a review; it's a brief list of things that I can't believe actually exist in a real, published game.

• An adventure game with no save-game feature.

Aha, you say knowingly, that isn't necessarily a stupid idea. Perhaps the game automatically saves your position when you quit, so that you can pick up at the same point.

Well, Inherent Evil doesn't do that, but it does checkpoint every time you finish a major section. (Eight sections total, I believe.) So as long as you finish a section before you pack it in for the night, the effect is the same.

But:

• An adventure game with no save-game feature, which also contains "enter-and-die" traps. You know, where you find an open panel, crawl inside, and are immediately killed. So that you have to start that section over from scratch.

A moment of silence while we meditate on that.

• Objects that you can't pick up until you learn the reason why. You find rubber gloves, but you can't pick them up. After you find the live wires, which can only be handled by rubber gloves, then the gloves become takeable.

Note the result: if you have to start a section over (because there's no save-game feature -- see figure 1), you can't run through it in the most efficient way. You have to keep going back and forth, everything you did the first time, only now you're not learning anything new.

• A voiceover that says "Hm. These might come in handy," when you do take the rubber gloves. (At which point you are guaranteed to know exactly what they're handy for.)

• Live wires that can kill you if you click on them, even though you know they're live. (I made the mistake of clicking directly, instead of using the gloves object. I died. See figure 1.)

• Long animations, with no way to break or skip them. This includes the splash screens and title animations.

• An application that quits when you complete a major section, thus forcing you to restart it to continue, and sit through the splash screens and title animations, which have no way to break or skip them.

And finally -- and trust me, this is the grated Pecorino Romano on top of the lasagna of game-review goodness --

• A smartass you-have-died screen, which appears whenever you die -- see figure 1 -- and gives you a choice of twelve tombstones, two of which (randomly selected) allow you to continue the game instead of dying. There's no puzzle or trick to this; it's just a one-in-six chance of avoiding the trap. And a five-in-six chance of being kicked out, so that you have to restart, sit through the etcetera etcetera, which you can't etcetera.

Plus, when you choose an incorrect tombstone, the game makes a mocking comment. "You're not very good at this, are you?"

You have one guess what my response was.

Conclusion: I stopped playing.

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