Tiny Review: Digital: A Love Story
If Retro Game Challenge was a different experience — say, if instead of capturing those years spent playing Famicom/NES games at your best friend’s house after school, Indies Zero instead crafted a game about exploring the underbelly of the online world on your first computer before the World Wide Web even existed — you would have something like Digital: A Love Story.
I admit it’s a weakness of mine that I must examine every game I enjoy through RGC’s lens, but as much as that DS title is a love letter to NES gaming, Digital is a tribute to those late nights wasted in front of your computer connecting to Bulletin Board Systems, analyzing strange screen names, and sending private messages to people you had no business talking to at your age.
Digital’s developer Christine Love provides this blurb for the PC/Mac/Linux adventure game’s premise:
“A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988. Crawl BBSes, uncover conspiracies, commit telephone fraud, fall in love. Welcome to the 20th century.”
Six details that are fab:
- Arguing with Star Trek nerds and Japanophiles.
- Excellent soundtrack with several tunes from chip groups like Starscream and 4mat.
- Digital offers such an accurate experience, there were moments where paranoia set in and I debated whether to download software (“How do I know this isn’t a virus?”), use the same passwords on different BBSes, or even enter my actual name.
- Simple tricks that satisfy a video game craving I’ve had for decades — feeling like an elite hax0r without actually knowing a damn thing about hacking. Previous hacking-themed titles I tried out like .hack//Link, Shadowrun’s console releases, and Bloodnet failed to quench this seemingly basic thirst.
- Like RGC, Digital leaves out trappings from the old days that hampered the experience, like getting knocked offline when someone trips on the cord connecting your computer’s modem to a phone jack, pedos messaging you to ask if you have pix to trade, or your mom grounding you after she sees how much you ran up the phone bill with extended calls to unfamiliar long distance numbers.
- Digital offers a new kind of princess to save.
Three details that are butt:
- No option to change the soundtrack and listen to other songs you’ve accessed.
- Downloaded software doesn’t appear on your in-game desktop until the application is relevant to the story.
- Having to connect to The Matrix and grab new c0dez for making long distance calls was cute at first, but it was annoying by the sixth time I had to do it.
Score:
The game is free and likely available for your platform; you’d be a fool to not download and play it. Even if you didn’t go through a BBS phase in the late 80s/early 90s, there’s still a lot to enjoy here!
Buy: Retro Game Challenge
[Via Auntie Pixelante]
tags / digital / reviews / bbs / indie / ec
