Review: Mr. Robot — The Daily Five/Nine
This is the best #VoiceFirst interactive story game I know, so let’s examine what it is about, what makes it so amazing, and what we can learn from it.
Admittedly, The Daily Five/Nine was released a while back (October 25th 2017, if I’m not mistaken), but it took me a while to try it out, but it immediately got me 110% hooked, and I played it five or six times by now.
Right now it’s on ‘featured’ rank #59 of the US Skill store’s Games category, but it must have been higher when both the Skill and the third season of Mr. Robot were released in autumn 2017.
So, what is it about?
You do know about Mr. Robot, right? You don’t need to have seen it to appreciate the Skill, but you should at least scan its Wikipedia article. And I can personally recommend it, for what it’s worth.
The Skill’s story is intriguingly convoluted, a bit like Inception:
- On the outermost layer, it’s you, interacting with Alexa / your device and consuming the actual ‘Daily Five/Nine’ podcast (spoken the actual ‘Mr Robot’ character played by Christian Slater). This is the ‘fourth wall’ that will get broken as the story progresses.
- On the second layer, there’s an agent of FSOCIETY (or another party? Up to you to find out!) doing the fourth wall breaking by talking to you as the player, in the characteristic distorted voice.
- On the third layer, it’s the TV show’s protagonist Elliot Alderson talking with you ‘on the phone’. He shares observations with you and asks you to make decisions while you’re conduction a mission together.
- On the innermost layer, Elliot is acting out the mission and talking to non-player characters. Most of the story switches between the third and fourth layer, but at one point it’s ‘surfacing’ to the outermost level.
This storytelling technique itself is already highly immersive, and of course it’s complemented by brilliant dialogue that perfectly captures the feeling of the show and sent shivers down my spine more than once.
That sounds great, but why would you play it more than once?
Yes, great question! The ‘hook’ is that it offers interesting choices, and a reward that is difficult to predict. Let’s look at both:
It’s an interactive story game, so most of the player’s interaction are of the ‘The receptionist comes after us. Should we lie or should we threaten her?’ type. What makes these choices interesting is that they’re all about equally plausible — I never had the feeling that one choice is obviously wrong, or worse than the other.
And the best part is that neither option (except for the first two ones, which are for warming up) makes you lose the game, in the sense of experiencing an early ‘Game Over’, but instead gets Elliot into a fascinating mini-story. This was one main motivator for me to go through this Skill, just to consume as much of the content as possible.
I am not going to spoil the fun for you, but… There’s one point in the game with a hidden option. This one is somewhat difficult to find, and I actually had to look it up, but… I don’t like puzzle games all that much, so this didn’t frustrate me personally.
Interestingly, activating that hidden option is actually the only factor that determines whether your ‘mission’ was a success or not — However, as a typical user you recognize this only after two or three repetitions of the game. Until then, the player gets an evaluation of some of the choices they made from Elliot (typically bad ones), and the prospect that they can avoid his critique and/or unlock new content if they make better choices provides some good motivation to come back.
Is there anything that could make the Skill more enjoyable?
More content!
The only thing that someone (not me!) might dislike about the Skill is that it’s linear-ish and offers no real choice in how the story develops. Instead, the story has some fixed points, and then some degree of freedom in which path to take for getting to the next fixed point. On the other hand, this keeps the story consistent and, from the writer’s perspective, offers a lot of choice without having to write lots of different stories with different endings.
So, what’s the conclusion?
As I don’t tire to mention, this is the best interactive storytelling voice game I know — Not only because of the compelling theme and content, but also because it got all three success factors (discoverability, engagement and retention) perfectly right.
However, this Skill’s quality level is far beyond the reach of any independent voice game producer. The content was obviously provided by the show’s producers USA Networks, and the Skill itself was built Earplay, a Boston-based company that successfully specialized in #VoiceFirst interactive story games.
Any take-home messages?
Right, I promised those. So, here they are:
- Experiment with breaking the Fourth Wall.
It’s doesn’t work for everyone and every kind of voice game, but I know at least one interactive story game that also used this storytelling device. - You can keep a balance between linearity and writing effort
I’m not a writer, but before I tried this Skill, I thought that an interactive story game would either be linear (like an audiobook where you had to say ‘resume’ every now and then in an interesting way) or tree-shaped like the classic ‘Choose your own adventure’ books. However, this voice game demonstrates a snowman-shape that offers both a lot of interesting choice for the character, and keeps the writing effort in check. - Provide feedback for the choices the player made
People love feedback, to telling them where they did well and where they didn’t can motivate them to go through the story one more time.
With which points do you agree or disagree? What have I forgot to mention? What was helpful to you? I care to make these articles as helpful to you as possible, so any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
