Corruption

I was in the mood for another Magnetic Scrolls adventure, and had tried to get into this a few times before without much success, so I had another go at Corruption. I did make a fair amount of progress, before trying to work out if the hospital section was a red herring or not, and finishing off the game with a walkthrough.

As you might guess from that, the game did not utterly enthrall me, even if it was reasonably fun! It's actually a rather small game, compared to Guild of Thieves or Jinxster. The trickiness is in how the game is heavily time-oriented, with certain events happening at certain times. You need to be at the right place at the right time to collect all the evidence you need to show your innocence.

As such, it's actually much more of a scavenger hunt text adventure than it initially looks. On the other hand, the way to find out what you need to do, when, seems to largely consist of following people around, or hanging around seeing what happens at particular times, in order to construct the correct walk-through. In other words, to complete the game, you must make notes from other runs, and then make the character act like a psychic. I'm not a great fan of this approach.

Finding the "treasure" was in a few cases counter-intuitive, as you must not only work something out, but make the evidence obvious to your player character. In other cases, it was simply a bit obscure.

There's a fair amount of filler in what is even then a fairly small game. Irrelevant locations abound, as do red herring NPCs. Compared to GoT and Jinxster, it's a real disappointment. It's very much not a game I'd want to try to complete without a walkthrough, but it's reasonably fun for a quick explore with hints.

Posted 2015-11-23.