I'm a sucker for choose-your-own-adventure games that give the player the ability to shape the story. While not perfect, Heavy Rain is one of my favorite examples of this.
Yo, @thetylerhayes! Since you have an Apple Watch, please download, play, and report back. Thanks. 😁
Have you played it yet, @alokepillai? Thoughts?
@alokepillai@rrhoover OK UPDATE, thoughts so far: was intrigued by the concept (especially because I'd already tried Spy_Watch, a similar game), not impressed after a few hours, bored, and sometimes confused.
- Not impressed: this game, just like Spy_Watch, has a long onboarding in the beginning where you're basically waiting for text messages to come in. While this hypothetically could be exciting because they come from a person stranded on some moon somewhere, just waiting for texts is not fun when you have no emotional involvement in that person. It's like seeing the "..." symbol in a messaging app from someone you don't know at all. Say they put an avatar over the screen that was shrieking for help and then got drowned out in video noise, that would draw me in. Cf. Myst.
- Bored: most of the time you're not interacting with the app, and the idea is that the app hits you up every now and then with an "Incoming Message" from the stranded person. But because the game didn't set my caring for this person up well and there's nothing I can do besides just watch their texts roll in and then choose either [Do This] or [Do That] buttons, it's effectively a Tomogatchi without graphics <-- as unexciting as it sounds. Choose Your Own Adventure books were fun when we were kids because we were scared/excited to enter that next unknown environment! We cared! It felt real! Our lives were at stake! (And this is ignoring anything to do with the psychology of someone on their phone, where the default behavior is to bail via the Home button after even a second of dissatisfaction in an app, vs. reading a book and the only thing you can do is completely abandon the book and go find your phone/computer; a higher amount of effort.)
- Confused: if the cool thing about this is that you also can use it on your Watch, I must be using it wrong. All I get is a push notification on my watch every few hours saying "Incoming Message" but I can't open it on my Watch or do anything other than Dismiss it. I have to open my phone. This makes me feel like either it's broken or I'm doing it wrong (which is the last thought you ever want a user to have).
There's potential here but overall it feels either rushed or conceptually flawed—tough to tell which in its current form—and so ultimately it suffers.
Would not recommend (for now).
Games on Apple Watch are interesting. My initial reaction is the wearable platforms don't lend themselves to a great game platform (like graphing calculator games) but steps forward like this are really encouraging. Where there is input/output - there are games :)
Its an interesting idea for the Apple watch where there is going to be a real challenge to monetize free to play games. Agree with Tyler that execution is not ideal but there is something there...
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