At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises. Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
Category: Games
The Novelist
The Novelist—developed and published by Kent Hudson/Orthogonal Games—is an interesting and only slightly flawed game. When I heard about it, it was characterized as kind of a take on The Shining—the Kubrick film, more than the King novel—in that it involves a novelist and his family in an isolated house shared by an invisible presence. There’s one big difference: the viewpoint character that you play in the game is the ghost. Well, sort of.