I just finished this short game, and i did not like it.

Seriously, i don't understand how you can call this "game" brilliant. And the only problem with the game is that it takes away your control sometimes?

What about the lack of gameplay, the mediocre (and very obvious) story, and the poor visuals? (I'm all for lo-fi art, but this lacks a sense of style and design).

I just don't get the hype, can someone please explain to me why this game is brilliant?

Awesome stuff dude, despite the above comment! Probably just an Edge reader who's out of their element!

May spoil some stuffs(then again i don't know why you are reading the comments before playing the game:

never heard of Terry and Stephen, but i really enjoyed this game, didn't bothered me to much that near the end you lose the commands, my first impression was that it would be nice the game to have multiple choices, but i think that following a linear patch make the atmosphere in the game better.
I felt like the ending could be a lot better, more sad, maybe you could enter in a room with satanic rituals or something.

I must say that this is the worst game either of them created. Just... mediocre. I was disappointed.

I was really into this until like the last ten seconds :| That ending fell really flat. Still, for most of it I was really excited and tense, it had a great atmosphere.

I liked it. It's a bit short but the way the story is told is pretty good.

So, are there any multiple endings? Is there a way to find out what exactly was in that final room? I guess not.

Just gave it a roll; nice work guys. I have to say, it had me feeling like there was someone following me the whole way through, and I was actually quite surprised by the ending (at least the ending I saw). For the characters of the future, it wound up being a somewhat happy ending, which wasn't what I was expecting at all considering both Terry and Increpare's usual style.

I really did enjoy this, even if it really was essentially gameplay-less. The atmosphere alone made it worth it.

I didn't like the controls, at all, though.

(SPOILERS OH NO) I think there's a reason certain parts were cutscenes. The best example would be the last Judith scene, where you have no control and she walks into the room. I think it's supposed to show how strong her curiosity is, and such. It adds a lot of emphasis and importance to the action.

If there's something to like in this game then that's definitively the combination of raycasting and cinematic and story-driven gameplay.

I must agree with Kensai, I didn't see the point in this game. The gameplay was good in such way that I was always expecting that something was following me, but otherwise, the game wasn't that good.

At least I don't get the hype.

I enjoyed it quite a lot, though yeah, more could have been done with the ending!

(SPOILER-ish)
Neat, but the husband's beard is the wrong color.

The game wasn't all that great, or rather, all the hype combined with the incredible first part of the game made the ending and later bits feel shallow and mediocre. I also agree that a lot of the art could be better (not in that more pixels should be thrown at it, but that more consistency and THOUGHT should be put behind the low number of pixels you're given.)

nice catch Crunchy Frog.

about the story not the beard color.

if youre complaining about this not being a "game" then dont call it a game. its interactive fiction. which wait! is what a game is.

if youre complaining about the story then youre obviously spoiled by movies.

if you dont like dungeon crawlers or text adventure/adventure games then you wont like this. that doesnt make it a bad game, or not a game at all.

keep your negativity to yourself.

WHY do people keep on calling this a "game"?

It's NOT a bloody game. It's a graphic linear story with nothing game-like about it.

I really liked it, up until the ending, which seemed rather anti-climatic almost. While I'm sure it was supposed to be open to interpretation, it just didn't really tie it up enough for me. (spoilers) I almost think it might have worked out better to see some of the parts (like the room with the prisoner) with the person in the future before the person in the past.

I loved this.
I'm not sure what, but something about it really struck a chord.

...., its called a game because you move. Hell, IF is considered a type of game. And if you don't count that there's always the fact that quite a few games are linear.

I liked it, nice story. But I didn't feel like it was a game, more like a interactive story.

um... yeah, I could like this, if the ending actually made sense, and tied things together, instead of just failing.
Also, it would be fun (almost like a game) if there was actually some gameplay.
Um, no offense, but I hated this.

It makes sense if you know the story of Bluebeard. It's about curiosity and how you can't control it.

People say this lacks gameplay, but try and imagine at as a movie.

It's impossible. Part of the game is that it takes control from you, leaving you helpless to resist something, and it conveys that in the most effective way possible, only possible in a game.

it was great honestly. no more words for now :)

It's true this isn't all that interactive, and it's completely linear, but I truly enjoy the combination of the old raycaster type engine and low resolution graphics with the compact, linear and dark story. The strength of this -- call it what you want -- is the atmosphere. I find atmosphere to be a powerful feature, because it allows the story to be more transporting.

It's amusing for a while, but it just gets tedious to relabel all these things as "semi interactive linear narrative".

We just call it a game for christ sake and acknowledge that it really pushes the boundaries on the definition which need I mention there exists no general consensus of the definition.

It's certainly useful to describe this in contrast to typical definitions of the game as well.

I never knew that Terry Cavanagh was such a fan of Bartók! If you haven't seen the opera it's really quite good. It was pretty surreal once I realized what I was playing.

As to the "game" aspect...it's late and I don't want to bother with it. All I can say is that it drew me in pretty well. That and the ending didn't make much sense.

[ULTIMATE SPOILER]

Silent Hill 2 + Bluebeard = Judith

People complaining about the ending:

1) It didn't make sense. This isn't CSI Miami here, it's a ghost story, it's not supposed to be realistic.

2) It was anti-climactic. I assume you mean by this that you would have preferred something grislier (somebody mentioned a satanic ritual above). This would have cheapened the story somewhat.

Also the point of the game is to make you dread what's behind that last door but still be compelled to open it. It achieved this very successfully in my case and so it doesn't really matter what actually turns out to be in there.

ok two things:
-it ends way too abruptly it leaves all these plot holes open
-there is no actual gameplay

Cecil, it isn't a bad thing to have negative thoughts of a game, you don't have to prove that the negative criticism is actually the players' fault.

The Bluebeard story brought a lot more to this, after reading it.

This is pretty terrible as a game, but since it isn't really much of one it makes more sense to judge it by the story. The problem with that is that it's pretty terrible as a story as well. Initially the atmosphere was a great, but over time it became really clear that you were just going down a single hallway with rooms that would open up as the story progressed, which made the game play elements feel like a tedious chore that you could do automatically after the third room opened up.
In terms of plot, there simply isn't much there. It's decent, if mechanical, and up until the end it stays very intriguing. But the game hits you with an ending so abrupt and half-assed that it made me crack up. Nothing is resolved, even in an open-ended way that could have been interesting. The game just ends on such a stupid, sudden note that it feels as if it was making fun of the player for wasting their time. As is this is the game equivalent of a half-finished remake of a much better story, a remake that hopes to distract you from its inadequacy with a bunch of doodles drawn in the margins.

heres what i think.

first of all this is not a game that was intended to please the mainstream (or ok, the mainstream indie) audience. so negative coments about the gameplay (?) and such are really missing the point. its like playing rescue the beagles and then stating that its a bad game because theres no dialogue.

so this is a story-driven game. and the story itself is also not intended for the mainstream audience. its a kind of story that drives you into making up your story about it, by giving you just enough details to tickle your imagination.

its a mixture of a classic 'curiosity killed the cat' kind of story on one side, and a kind of experimental storytelling which lets you make your own theories on the other side. all of that bundled in an A class atmosphere cookie, everyone will agree here.

also, someone might find the ending flat, but it's all about what you expect from it. here's one person who really enjoyed it. enter the room and join my darlings from the past. *the doors close*
powerful enough for me.

another interesting aspect is how you get a happy ending and a very unhappy ending served at you at the same time. and yeah, what's really intersting is how it may make you think about how many different stories may be happening in a same place.

so where's the hype? you get a classic book-reading kind of experience, only in first person with retro graphics and adventure game elements. like saying magic words and teleporting yourself right in a middle of a written story. there's the hype.

To me the plot is interesting.
The storytelling is intentionally puzzling, and it made me think for a while after I finished the game (so did Silent Hill 2, that Lazyboi mentionned).

The only thing that bothered me while playing was the lack of voices, because it's sometimes hard to recognize who is speaking, despite the colours.

PS: sorry for my poor english, I'm not a native speaker.

its not always about game play and even story can come second to atmosphere, thats what silent hill did have until team silent disbanded. Somethings like this should haunt you after unless you are too involved in the next corporate, committee created, safe, generic FPS to think. And to quote mega64, "if you're not indie f**k you"

The game download page states the game is about control, but I don't think the game was very successful in exploring this theme. Forcing the character to move into the last room only, while trusting the player will be curious enough to explore all other rooms by their own volition, seems odd.

I also didn't really think the modern story added much - all you do is walk around in empty rooms and pretty soon you realize that you're not going to find her until the end.

The game has a somewhat interesting atmosphere, but it doesn't impress.

I recently played through Judith -- I must have downloaded it from here weeks ago -- and admittedly, I was not impressed.

I understand the urge to try and tell a story interactively like this, but it tells a story like a book, feels like a movie, looks like a game, and fails to successfully capture the strengths of ANY of those mediums.

To call Judith 'interactive' is ludicrous; 'interactive' implies decisions, that the player has some control. Even if the story demanded linearity (which I don't believe it does) the game *could* have been littered with details and other interactive elements that the players could explore in order to flesh out the environment and give them a sense of control.

Additionally; while I love pixel art and low resolution graphics, Judith suffers from lack of detail. The blocky, featureless world the game takes place in could be immensely better if the panels that made it up were painted with some detail. Many of the reviewers here hail this title for its atmosphere, but all I can see is how much more could be done for it, it terms of ambient audio, voices, background objects and higher resolution imagery.

Ultimately, Judith presents itself to me as a prototype; a very simple moving storyboard for something much more complex and fascinating which we may never actually see.

Greg, you did read the byline, right?

* Massive Spoilers Below *

I played through Judith, and I am also familiar with the story of Bluebeard.

What always struck me about Bluebeard (although I haven't read this interpretation from anyone else) is that it is a story about trust. In the story, Bluebeard leaves his wife all the keys to his house, and tells her there is one door she must never open. She does so, thus violating his trust, as so he intends to kill her, as he has before with his previous wives (all of whom, it is assumed, violated his trust in a similar manner). The point is that, had she shown that she was trustworthy, she would not have been killed. Obviously a small violation of marital trust does not typically warrant execution, but this is a fairy tale, so I'll cut it some slack.

How does this relate to Judith? Well, the basic premise is the same, although the trust element is not initially articulated by the husband; it is, presumably, implicit in the fact that they are married. Judith does not talk to her husband in order to find out his secrets, rather, she goes off exploring behind his back. At the game's end, her husband does explicitly ask her to trust him, and she doesn't, and thus she meets the same grisly end as his previous wives.

Contrast this with the modern scenario, where the relationship is based on mutual love and dedication to one another. The point I took from the juxtaposition of the two scenarios is that blind trust and secret-keeping is no basis for a relationship. Openness and understanding is the route to happiness.

But, I must admit, I kind of struggled to get that much meaning out of the story. The themes in the two scenarios seemed to be more or less disconnected from each other. Also, I couldn't understand the thematic role played by the prisoner, other than to show the immoral nature of the husband and the compassionate nature of Judith herself.

I have no problem at all with this kind of method of storytelling, and I felt the graphics were perfectly adequate for what was being attempted, and a sense of atmosphere was created with some artistry. But, ultimately, I thought the game didn't really cohere from a thematic point of view. This was largely due to what I took to be an underdeveloped characterisation of the relationship between the modern couple, and a failure to flesh out the emotional level on which the historical couple were interacting.

So, all in all, I thought it was well worth a play through, but a lot more could have been done within the limits of the engine, and with the setting and characters that to be explored within it.

This was pretty weak.

The authors clearly did not set out to make a work that functioned as an interesting series of decision, so I won't bother talking about that, except to note that this is hardly an excuse!

Unfortunately, the lack of "game" means that the atmosphere, plot and delivery of Judith become vastly more important than they would be otherwise. Theophilus basically voiced my problems with the theme & plot.

The one thing Judith has going for it - and what I believe most people who enjoyed the game are responding to - is that it involves a setting and situation not often found in video games. This is novel but the lackluster execution, disrespect for the player, and painful linearity make me think that Judith would be far superior as a short film or machinema.

Hi - played the game, liked it a lot. Want to discuss the content though: I dont understand how future / present man has gotten the necklace to give to Emily? What do you guys think about that?

It doesn't make any sense at all. Its not a game about control. Its a game of confusion.