I always feel pretty awful when I start writing a review or article, and end up ditching it in favor of a more current thought or game. What's even worse though is when I end up spending hours and hours on an article or essay only to realize the entire thing is rubbish, and should just be scrapped.

That's pretty much what happened with my thoughts on the interactive drama Façade.

The first attempt at dissecting and analyzing it focused more on the actual structure, story and characters, which I found to be rather disappointingly executed. Then I realized the nature of a one-act play, and switched gears to the nature of an experimental work. But that was mostly bloat. All that I really had to say about was:

Façade is an interesting experiment, one that's important to show, if nothing else, that a text-based input system combined with real-time graphics just won't effective work thanks to the mucked up pacing typing requires.

I mean, what else can you say about an experiment? Façade really doesn't feel too polished, but as a small, independent project it's not really concerned with many of the complaints I have (although ironing out that bug that causes the door to not close when Trip leaves, and just has him standing still in the doorway would probably aid in a more immersive experience). Personally, I find some of the writings (PDF) to be much more interesting than the actual project.

Honestly, I'm just glad people are pushing forward with experiments like these, academic and even homebrew research & development. This is what I'd like to think of when it comes to independent PC gaming, instead of legions of software clones and Bust-A-Move rip-offs. Because regardless of a botched execution, the ideas contained in the end product are definitely worth taking note of.