Game review: Chloe is home

Meghane is offline.

Khairikasinan

Summary: The dialogue is unsettling and the build-up is timed neatly. The chat itself is comparable to what a true chat group looks like, giving realism to the game. This game is absolutely worth your time! Just don’t complain to me if you feel slightly paranoid afterward.

Introduction to the game

A flatmate group chat unknowingly welcomes an uninvited guest into their midst. Part of the Interact-If’s 2022 Game Jam. This is their first game jam ever.

The game uses a simulated phone in which you can use a single app, namely the group chat with your flatmates. The game also makes use of audio effects, not right from the beginning, but it will later on. So be sure to enable your loudspeaker or headset to get the best experience.

My opinion

I love it when you are given little options at the beginning, just a dark/light theme and a font change. The dark theme and the default font it is because the dark theme helps me get in the mood for an unsettling story. We are thrown right into the action after we start the game, skipping an introduction and letting us chat with our flatmates immediately. We can conveniently use the spacebar to continue receiving or sending messages, or one could simply point-and-click.

We start by chatting with our flatmates, who seem to be discussing all sorts of things. It’s one big chatty group that feels highly connected. Meghane our flatmate reminds us of their cousin coming to our flat later this day during the night. The cousin is named Chloe, or rather Chloé, but you will find out soon enough if you play the game, as to why this is. Chloe seems to ask us rather disturbing questions from time to time, making the protagonist freak out. It all starts out as great fun because we are playing the 20-questions game, but soon Chloe starts to ask rather ominous things and acts rather casual about it, almost as if this was normal to her. To prevent spoilers, I won’t deep-dive into the details, but Chloe is something else, something we might not have expected.

The dialogue is unsettling and the build-up is timed neatly. What starts as a normal conversation quickly turns into something completely different. The chat itself is comparable to what a true chat group looks like (I also live in a flatmate situation, where the group chat looks rather similar), giving realism to the game. I dislike there is no smooth scroll behavior because the messages pop in and I needed to adjust my eye positioning a lot to match the height of the new messages, but the UI is snappy and it does work all the time. Just like Litrouke’s gam, A man outside, this game suddenly stops, leaving us with a huge cliffhanger, fortunately, it was the theme of the jam, so we will cut you some slack. This game is absolutely worth your time!