adam cadre

Photopia made me interested in Interactive Fiction. I enjoy seeing how writers and artists can experiment with communication and narrative in different media, and I think Adam Cadre is extremely creative in how he works with a medium to interact with a reader/viewer/player/etc.

Although I found Photopia intriguing -- like reading an interesting book -- I don't think it was as impacting for me as it was for other people, judging by their blogs, but I decided that I enjoyed it enough to check out some of Cadre's other work.

The comments about Cadre's "Shrapnel" made the game seem unresistable:

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Damn you." —Ian Finley

"Really good game, but REALLY CREEPY. I honestly woke up with nightmares after playing it." —Sean Gaffney

"This was the most unsettling piece of IF I've ever had the pleasure to play." —Oren Ronen

"I think I'm now warped for life." —Alan Monroe

Could it really be that disturbing? I guess my penchant for trying to scare myself (see my last post about Silent Hill) got the best of me.  read more »

I haven’t played much computer adventure games in my lifetime but would conclude that Photopia was enjoyable to experience. I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first but as I got the hang of it I noticed that there was more than one narrative taking place. It would seem that these different stories did not relate to each other at all but impressively at the end the stories come together marvelously.

I didn’t understand the color changing until I looked up the definition of Photopia-“vision in bright light” (dictionary.com). It was then that I understood how the title was complementing the game or even vice versa. There’s probably more to it than that but that was enough for to understand the oddity of the color changing taking place between plots. I found it interesting that after certain vocabulary words definitions were interjected. Honestly, I felt slighted that I was being told what 2nd grade vocabulary terms stood for.  read more »