Blue Orchid preview - "An interactive thriller that lacks a little bit of pull at the moment"
Indie studio Elia Games has launched the first chapter for Blue Orchid, its narrative thriller that puts you in the shoes of an outsider helping a group of people escape an unfortunate fate. Out now in Early Access on Android, the game sort of takes over your phone in that you'll be forced to work with these strangers and answer their plea for help from your device - but is it all worth the time and effort?
Table of contents:
THE STORY OF BLUE ORCHID
For a narrative-driven game, there really isn't much story at the moment, since only the first chapter is playable. You start Blue Orchid by playing a game, which is a casual tapping game that's interrupted by an unknown phone call (you can, by the way, play this little tapping mini-game at your leisure and try to hit the high score). Someone then contacts you with a cry for help, and things spiral down from there.
I won't spoil anything for you, but you'll basically need to help a group of people you don't know who are trapped in a mysterious hotel somewhere. They've somehow found your number and opted to ask for help, which will set off a series of escape-room puzzles that you'll need to solve to help those people make it out of the hotel alive.
BLUE ORCHID GAMEPLAY
The people on your phone (the game adopts a phone interface where you interact with characters via group texts) are essentially trapped in a game of death, where a random hooded figure contacts you from time to time to taunt you. You'll get to know the strangers in the hotel via their interactions with you on the messaging app of your "phone", and occasionally, they'll send you photos of where they are and you'll have to help them figure things out.
For instance, they might send you a picture of a room where you can tap to look for clues, investigate codes, ace logic puzzles and so on. Each puzzle isn't really much of a headscratcher - at least in the first chapter - but I suppose the focus is the narrative of these people asking for your help rather than the puzzles themselves.
The game is meant to engage you by asking you to input your name and profile, and the answers you give aren't always in a multiple-choice format. You have to answer carefully and pick your choices wisely though, as the fate of these random people is, for better or worse, in your hands.
WHAT'S THE APPEAL?
Of course, that's where my biggest issue with the game lies. At the moment, I don't really feel connected or invested in these characters, which kind of waters down my motivation to keep helping them. The dialogue choices also sometimes break my suspension of disbelief, as reactions to certain situations are a little unrealistic. In some instances, my character would have overly heightened reactions to things when in truth, my reaction would be "meh" at best.Another thing that broke my suspension of disbelief was that the characters were all interacting via a group chat. They may be separated into different rooms at times, but they're also often physically together in the same place - and yet they're all communicating with each other via text messages. I, as the only outsider, was supposed to be the only one they should be sending updates to. They shouldn't be updating each other via texts when they're all right there beside each other "in real life". It's just a little odd, to be honest.
I suppose that's the greatest shame here - that for a supposedly interactive game, the engagement isn't really as strong as it should be, nor is the narrative intriguing enough as of yet.
Still, it's a good effort for a first chapter, and perhaps it'll get better as the next chapters roll in. The developers have expressed their intent to include the Discord community in writing the actual narrative, so the engagement there might just improve. For now, if you're in the mood for a little bit of an escape-room thrill, you can try out the first chapter - it's only about half an hour long and is absolutely free.
