Grayout

I applaud the designers for this unique idea, but I found the “right” sentences were not always logical, or other possibilities that were equally valid — e.g. “Yeah sure” instead of “Yeah right”—were not accepted. And the game is very short for the money.

As a class we did Grayout over the course of 3 weeks. The kids say: creepy, fascinating disturbing... but in a good way. Exciting and full of twists. Make a new one! We already did Blackbar.

A very interesting concept, but the story is lazy, as it seems most of the effort went into the word play (which was often clever). Beyond that, it provided less than an hour of gameplay. To be fair, that may be because I had to look up instructions online. Not answers: instructions. The game provided none. Do I use all the words? Am I supposed to form grammatically correct sentences or just whatever gets my message across? Even with instructions, it was difficult to know what I was trying to say, what my response was supposed to be. Maybe I missed something, but this game was not worth the price it asks for. Bonus points for mentioning a polyamorous relationship though, I guess.

Am interesting world and concept and I liked Blackbar- unfortunately there’s a game breaking bug that makes it impossible to progress past the (irritatingly obscure) “waiting for godot” reference. I checked a couple of walkthroughs, the “correct” answer doesn’t work, impossible to move forward...

Logic isn’t great from clue to clue. No ability for hints, not really great leading. It ended up being mostly a waste of time and I’m deleting it without finishing because I’m so bored with it.

I loved Blackbar, so gave Grayout a whirl, too. The story is wonderful; it places you in a chilling dystopian scenario with sadistic keepers and little hope of escape. I enjoyed it. But as for gameplay, there’s not much here. The only “puzzle” comes from trying to figure out what the game designers thought my responses to other characters ought to be. And if the game designers thought, for example, that I ought to respond “That’s the right answer” then saying “That is correct” or “You’re right” or “That is right” or “You’re not wrong there” or even “That is the right answer” won’t be accepted by the game. I understand they wanted me to experience the frustration of helplessness and aphasia. But this is just the frustration of pure guessing, like randomly trying numbers on a bike lock until it opens. There’s never the delighted feeling you get when you finally figure out a puzzle based on cleverly hidden clues. There are barely any hidden / contextual clues to discover. The rest is just moving words around until you guess right.

The app still does not support the iPhone X and has very few design elements. Changing it to support it would be easy. Dev is either unskilled or lazy.

I loved the idea of playing with language and the challenge of expressing thoughts using limited words. I hated trying to guess the RIGHT thing to say - what the game expected. Developers: this would be really cool to experiment with some AI and language parsing - a kind of double-sided Turing test

This is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I have no idea how it got so many glowing reviews. The answers to the puzzles are completely arbitrary and oftentimes make zero sense. Do not recommend.

But there needs to be some kind of hint system. I’ve been stuck on the same “level” for hours unable to get it right. If it at leas gave the first word I might be able to steer it into the right direction but there are so many different sentences you can make with all the words given to you. I don’t want to look it up either and just be spoon fed the right answer.