One Eye Open by Colin Sandel and Carolyn VanEseltine

Review by thecanvasrose

A great game with lots to explore, great twists and turns, and a wonderfully spooky environment for play. If you haven't played it before, give it a whirl. It isn't quite like any other IF I've ever played. Scary, but not too nasty- like all good horror, it relies on suspense as opposed to pointless gore.

Review by Laraqua

I really loved this game! There's so much going on and while it was tricky to begin with, once I paid attention and saw I could List Verbs and even get Hints if I got really stuck it was great! Especially because this is one of the first text adventures I've played in a couple decades so I was really rusty on how to play them. A fantastic game and one that makes you keep thinking afterwards.

Review by youareso

a masterpiece of suspense and horror.

Review by starsallfall

I'm really interested in the story... but I have no idea how to do anything. How do you play this?

Review by ShatterThePieces

I haven't played all of it, but it is amassing!

Review by gymnast_911

its fantastics

Review by mollym24

INCREDIBLY well written. An immense amount of painstaking detail and imagery really made me feel like I was there, and added to the urgency of each task that needed to be completed. Also, delightfully complex I had to use the hint and concentration features several times and reaching the first ending still took me a great deal of time. Would love to go back and explore the other endings as well, as the one I arrived at was a pleasantly frustrating resolution that left me feeling as if I could have done better (in a good way). While these elements made it long and difficult, that's what I look for in a game like this, I don't want there to be a clear cut path for me to follow, and one simple and satisfying resolution. Intensely creepy and horrifyingly vivid images were rampant throughout each scene that truly made me nervous to play this game while alone. The only criticism at all that I have for this game is that now I'll be sad to play anything else as it will pale in comparison to the masterful writing and organization of this game. Well done!

Review by heartbreak_star

Brilliant, brilliant game. Suspenseful, unusual, and in many ways shocking, this is a well-thought-out piece of gamecraft. Thank you very much for it :)

Review by Something Moving Under The Bed

This is an in-depth game, which really works with its subject matter... I got really engrossed in the story, and there is a lot of detail to all the characters involved in the setting- For those who get really interested in all the snippets of information you can gather it's possible to learn a complicated picture of all the people involved, how they all related, and what happened to them. I loved the feeling of helplessness at points when seeing things from others' perspectives, and always wondered if I tried just a little harder whether things could be changed...!
It's well researched and so much effort has gone into the setting, and in many ways it's very unique, has some wonderfully realised sections and never goes in for cheap scares but builds up an atmosphere along with its story.
If anything it's this depth that I felt a little disappointed in at the end... You get to know (if you pay attention) so many details about so many people, and try so hard to help them - and then when the ending comes, it comes quite quickly and surreally and not much of the grander story seems involved, just very rich padding in the background; the format seemed set, even with all the endings. I guess that's a curse of very detailed storytelling- when you get interested in all the details, suddenly it has to end!

(Prizing originality in eerie storytelling - somethingmovingunderthebed.com)

Review by MisterPibb316

This is a horror game through and through, and from what I played of it to reach the first ending (I mostly followed the in-game walkthrough... if you don't, expect a massively time-consuming play, though one in which you might learn all sorts of information that enables you to understand the story more thoroughly), it is jump-scare free, which I greatly appreciate that. The morbid descriptions (including the word choices per se) are enough to put a pit in your stomach without you needing to hear sudden screams or look at images of bloody bodies, so kudos to the developers for sticking to text to get their gruesome ideas across.

With that said, this game isn't of typical puzzles--the 'correct' choices largely involve walking into the correct rooms, or performing actions you may not think to do on your own, such as (***MILD SPOILER*** doing things to corpses ***END MILD SPOILER***), but it is all the more bothersome that these actions are what the game is, indeed, looking for. I confess that 'guess the verb' (though the HELP command can make matters easier) is one of my least favorite kinds of text adventure, but what One Eye Open aims to do, it does (mostly) right.