[You can get all of Paul O'Brian's PrologueComp reviews through this link.]
When all I'm reading is a prologue, you don't have much time to hook me; you'd better do it fast. One of the best techniques for this is to float an intriguing idea, something I want to investigate further. That's just the approach taken by Compulsion, and it works beautifully. The genre is science fiction, which is perfect for the kind of "big idea" hook used here. Some kind of mind-control technology has been introduced into the military of the 24th century, and we see the societal debate about it through a series of box quotes. Normally I'm not a big fan of one box quote after another, especially at the beginning of a game, but this game doesn't overdo the technique (there are three), and the last one provides a nice punch to lead into the main character's POV. Once we get there, we get terse, driving sentences and fragments, setting up an urgent situation very nicely. There are stumbles here and there -- a general is named "Ira Asimov", evoking Isaac Asimov to no focused purpose, and some of the punctuation is absent or misplaced ("Less than a hundred of them you are betting.") [Editor's note - likely due to the fact that the author used all 2001 of his bits], but overall this is a very strong beginning.
Email me at: katsaris@gmail.com
Last updated: 01 Apr 2002
