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Photographs (PC) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Monday 17 August, 2020 // I stopped playing this game on: Monday 28 August, 2023
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
August 28, 2023 08:56:15 PM
I did eventually go back and finish it - and each story did have some different mechanic going on in addition to the photographs. I don't remember how everything connected/tied in narratively - but I do remember being satisfied enough to have been happy to finish the game. Now that I've finished it I must say that I'm much more impressed/satisfied with how the game integrated story stuff with mechanics and dynamics. It's a good example of ludonarrative coherence (as opposed to dissonance) such that I think I might use it as a more modern example. At this point Rohrer's Passage is a bit long in the tooth - though in its favor its not long and it's reasonably easy to explain. But, we'll see...
October 17, 2020 07:08:55 PM
Whoops. I should have started this gamelog a while back. However, I have played recently - so I guess that works. I really like the photography mechanic here - it's implemented in a way that feels authentic with nice detail on the focusing and the audio. The photography, however is not really the central activity - since most of the game is really about puzzle solving. So far I've played through 3 characters' stories (I had no idea how many there would be - to be fair I still don't know but interstitial messages suggest that there'll be 5 of them). The first was a sad touching story about a grandfather saving his granddaughter (at least that's what I recall at this moment). The puzzles here were sokoban-style - you have to get characters to an endpoint by making them go in a direction. The 2nd story was about a teenage girl on a school diving team and how she dopes to win, but then loses it all. This episode seemed a bit long for me - and the puzzles were of the "shoot cannon and make the projectile land in a spot, sometimes hitting a thing along the way". You could change the direction of the cannon and sometimes also moves items in the environment. I didn't really enjoy these puzzles - they seemed to trail-and-error-ry to me. The 3rd story, which I finished yesterday - was MUCH more interesting, here I felt that the puzzles were much more connected to the theme of the story. It's about an indigenous people who welcome settlers, but then the settlers take over, the indigenous people are starting and stuff (tragic stuff) happens. The puzzles here were tangrams - but once completed the area you placed them in would grow food and different characters would eat. In a few of them the "lines" (plow lines?) would not line up with the majority - and those tangram pieces had an indigenous character on them. When the food would grow - they wouldn't see any food grow on their piece and would go hungry that turn! Whoah! I thought that was really cool - and the same idea was also used later when doing a puzzle in a riverbed area (that's dry - they went hungry again). I recall being interested in this game due to the picture taking mechanic (there aren't that many games with it - though the WWI game (11-11?) is a recent example I remember), but I'm surprised there's more to the game than that. I'm curious what the last two stories will be about. So far there doesn't seem to be any common thread tying them all together...

Photographs (PC)