Shadow of Destiny

Jesus Christ.

So, Amazon recommended this game to me after I got Indigo Prophecy, and when I looked it up it sounded like a cute little narrative-driven adventure game. It's like a murder mystery, but the twist is, you play as the victim - who gains the ability to travel through time from a supernatural post-mortem assistant.

You spend each chapter of the game being killed (because it's your destiny!), then going back in time and figuring out how to prevent your death, which involves more going back in time. But you've got a time limit - yeah, present time is passing at the same rate as past-time, so if you don't save yourself before it's too late, you're toast.

It seemed like an interesting premise, and I guarantee that a great game could be made out of it. But this game isn't it. It plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and is just as bad as the worst Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were. A huge town is filled with basically nothing. Vapid NPCs occupy your time limit with retarded one-sided conversations. Lousy voice acting accompanies badly written and/or translated dialog; none of the characters are even respectable, let alone cool.

Cutscenes can be skipped if you've played them before, but if you get a Game Over, guess what, you've got to reload, and now you can't skip the cutscenes! You can only save inbetween chapters, so if you run out of time, you have to restart and waste your life staring at the chapter's scenes all over again.

Of the game's ten chapters (+ prologue), I finished the prologue in four minutes, the first chapter in four minutes, and the second one in about half an hour, most of that half hour being cutscene. Actually, most of the four-minute ones were cutscene, too.

This game is absolute shit. Right now the only thing it's got going for it is that, on the off-chance it has a great ending, I should be able to get to it inside of a couple hours.

Progress: Chapter 3