IfComp08: Afflicted
In Afflicted, you take on the role of a city health inspector, tasked with inspecting a fairly gross restaurant. At first, you wander the restaurant, making notes on violations (and there's a ton of violations). Each violation you note drops the restaurant's "score," making it seem that the way to win is to flunk the restaurant and finish your job.
But it doesn't end there. Well, it could end there, but likely you come across something that piques your interest, or you want to see just how low the score can go.
And then you find a crate in the basement with the mutilated body of a woman inside.
And she's watching you.
This sudden turn from just gross to plainly horrific was so casually executed that some reviewers took issue with the fact that the avatar has little to no reaction to much of the horror he/she experiences.
Severed foot in the garbage? Check. -2 points. Human entrails clogging up the meat slicer? Check. -5 points. He'll never keep his license at this rate. Whoops, it seems my hand's come off in the slicer, I'd better tie a tourniquet around that stump and go on with my business. Oh dear, I can't write notes anymore.
But I found the lack of reaction just put the horror on the player (me) instead of having it filtered through a narrator's voice, so I rather enjoyed it. Some of this is a bit like roleplaying - I believe it's possible, depending on the order of events, to realize that you're in way over your head, bleeding from a stump where your hand used to be, rush to your car and call it a day, presumably grabbing the hand on the way out the door. Of course, that's if the proprietor lets you.
Unfortunately, despite the engaging world and the well-crafted horror, the story itself is a bit thin and some of the puzzles are pointless, buggy, or with solutions so solidly in the "Huh?" category that I'd never think of them without the aid of a walkthrough. The help claims 17 endings, but only one seemed an especially 'good' ending, and to get that, you need to break into a room you don't know you can break into, retrieve an item you didn't know was in there, and use it in the correct room before the cops show up because you triggered an alarm when you broke in.
Additionally, the story seems, in hindsight, a bit far-fetched. The proprietor is keeping the woman in the basement to disable her (she's a vampire). Why not kill her? And once you start putting her back together, why does he do nothing to stop you?
7/10