Lost Words: Beyond the Page Review (Whiteswart)
Rhianna Pratchett, quite a well-known for now video game writer. Can't really estimate all of her works, but, as for Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider, and especially, the Thief restart (2014), can't really praise her performance. I mean, it might be not so bad as some unrelated writings, but... She really presses the wrong keys, pulls the wrong strings, like, all over the book. I understand the ideas and intentions in the stories mentioned, however, even with all the drama and action moments... Rihanna draws the implausible characters who seem incapable of the deeds attributed to them in the circumstances in which she throws them. That deep discrepancy between the images of the characters and the general line of events, no matter how well they are imagined and written down, destroys all immersion, breaks all the magic of empathy. Moreover, the video game is a complex multi-component work, where there are enough problems even without some implicit but felt subconsciously plot stutters that break the desire to follow the story. In the case of the Thief, for example, there was a terribly annoying constant loading of levels when moving through locations - that alone was almost enough to drop the game after a short while.
By this point, you can guess I am not a fan of Rhianna's works. Well... That's the right time to speak of the Lost Words: Beyond the Page. Because it is magnificent. It's a fantastic piece of work, where the story, the every written word, magically collides with the visuals and gameplay, making it all a splendid entertainment piece, an unquestionable example of the concept that video games are the art. Like, One of the Most Important Art Forms in History.
Sure, it's still quite a girlish tale, so, my wife and daughter welcomes it much more than my teen son, who's in the age of denying the obviously girlish products. But, just because it's so girlish from the start, it's working just as needed. A girlish trope in Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider and the Thief, by the degree Rhianna used it in her cooking, had almost ruined the taste of the served dish. She was not the author of the whole story, the whole concept in those other games, and simply by writing some pieces of text here and there, we ended up with cadavers, where the skin of one creature was stretched over the skeleton of another, anatomically not at all close to the intended appearance.
Again, returning to the Lost Words, that's where all works as intended. As needs to be. All in the right places. Maybe you'll not like this game - if you're not as much a reader as I am, and don't ready to follow some little girl in her diary writings - but I still think it's a masterpiece. Mark 10/10. If you have kids (at least somewhere in your heart) - get this game! It's one of the best for your buck.