Ratings War Demo

Books allow you to escape reality and get lost in a different world, using nothing but words and sentences that stimulate your imagination. Video games are more or less the same thing, but they help your imagination along the way with graphics, so you do not have to do all the work. However, text-based adventures were the norm in the beginning, and they can still make a comeback.

Ratings War is a text-based interactive novel in which you decide how the story evolves every step of the way, while also solving crimes and investigating mysteries. The game does not provide you with any kind of visual help, which means that you must do everything using your imagination. In part, this is a great way to see how far you can go, but it may not be such a popular approach nowadays.

The story takes place sometime in the future, in a city called New Angeles. It has film-noir influences, as well as crimes and detectives that try their best to solve them. Your role is that of a news agent in charge of documenting the most gruesome events, although it is also possible to participate in solving various murders. On top of that, you can also implant cameras in your eyes and make it easier to record everything, which is where the futuristic part comes in.

In case you are not familiar with text-based adventure games, your job is to read everything and make a choice in between the text bits. These choices influence the story and they decide how everything turns out in the end, which means that there are many ways your character can experience the events. This also makes it a blast to replay the game multiple times, in case you want to see alternate endings.

As mentioned before, there are no visual elements whatsoever, only text and radio buttons to choose your course of action. On the other hand, you can view statistics regarding your character, which are somewhat colorful at least. These provide you with details about your character’s skills, relationships and qualities, which adds a bit of role-playing to the mix.

All things being equal, Ratings War probably won’t attract a huge mass of people, due to the lack of graphics. On the other hand, if you appreciate a good story and the possibility to change it as you see fit, you might as well give the game a try and see whether it holds to scrutiny.