Here's my two cents worth on ep 2-1: I liked the idea of starting Monica out with few options and thus few choices, but thought the gameplay presented too many phony choices, which slowed the game down and harmed enjoyment.
Games are about player decisions and their consequences. A game designer must be careful to make sure that the choices players get to make are meaningful, or a game will quickly get the rep of being a mere clickfest. Ep 2-1 presents a mixture of meaningful and meaningless choices. Luckily, it is entirely possible to eliminate most of the clearly meaningless choices without anything more than a minimal rework of dialogue.
The player is first presented (after an introduction that does a pretty decent job of recapping Ep 1 without repeating it) with the choice of "does Monica clean today or not?" I played the game for ten days without cleaning or getting a kebob to see what would happen (Monica just stole cake from the gas station and slept). That worked as a choice, though the driver didn’t talk to Monica and nothing happened in the story line. That still counts as a choice, though. The woman of the house never fired Monica.
Cleaning isn’t that onerous, which I appreciated. A couple of clicks, and move on. I also appreciate the "quick jump" ability in the house and the slums.
The distribution of the flyers was onerous, though. As someone pointed put earlier, it has the totally unnecessary (at least at the moment) additional dialogue choice of greeting the person or leaving; if I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t have had Monica approach them. Extra clicks are annoying, since they don’t actually represent a choice. The player “choice” here is trying to remember which encounters give increased corruption, rather than, say, which ones look like they’d take a flyer.
The endgame bit was well-done, except that Biff didn’t take advantage of any of his opportunities to humiliate Monica. He talked a big game, but didn’t deliver in the end.
Recommendations:
- Make some of the people Monica meets in the poor areas more scary. They guy dressed in black on the street (who assumes she is giving him an address) could be a lot scarier, for example. So could the two guys near the hostel.
- Make Melanie a lot meaner to Monica, if Monica has been mean to her. She could, for instance, make Monica to strip off her dress in the office to get the final $1,000.
- Have Biff take much more advantage of Monica, especially for the last $1,000.
- Explain why Biff doesn’t recognize Monica when everyone else does (and doesn’t notice when they all refer to her as Monica). You could do this purely through dialogue: Monica could (after she “scares” him) explain that the real Monica paid for plastic surgery and voice lessons so that the real Monica would have a “body double” to handle boring situations or appear in public when Monica wanted to be somewhere else. Biff could explain that he knows where the real Monica is (he thinks she is at the ranch) and that “no one comes back from there.” He would then think that everyone else is fooled by the “Monica double” and the story would be tighter.
- Add one scene: Monica, stripped and tied to an X-frame or something, with whip marks, as the final scene when she gets caught and sent to the ranch. This is happening enough to make such a “bad end” scene pay off. The bad end scene with Marcus in the jail just isn’t very interesting.