IFComp 2009 review: Beta Tester by Darren Ingram

The setting makes Beta Tester basically a Portal clone without a clever physics gimmick. (There are portals, though, which makes the comparison even more obvious.)

In a twist of true Alanis Morissette irony Beta Tester is apparently not beta tested. Either it never occurred to the author of Beta Tester to beta test his game called Beta Tester, which is just sad, or he thought it would be really funny in an ironic way to not do that, which just isn't. Or he actually had it tested, but not enough and didn't bother to credit the testers, which is just as bad.

I might be a bit obsessive about the subject, so things like this make me bleed from the ears. That lowers the scores for you, Beta Tester.

Ignoring that the game is not that bad, actually. The writing is mostly proficient and there's some real content here. Even though the initial puzzle seems to toss any predictable causality off the window, it's fun to poke at it and I did solve it eventually. The two hour comp limit ran out shortly afterwards so I'm not sure how long the game actually is.

There's something going on with the narrator voice that I couldn't quite grasp onto. Is it talking to the player character or the player? It's hard to tell when the parts that look like that are talking to the player character are mixed with the default messages that are talking to the player.


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