Game: Party 2

Developer: Partytime

Unfortunately, this blew up on me before I had a chance to grab screencaps.

Story: You've gotten a gift for Ellie. It's a--

From what I can gather, you play a girl trapped in house, kept there by some kind of demonic entity. Apparently, the point is to play the game over and over again, more frightening things happening with each play through. Unfortunately, I was only able to get through twice before my anti-virus insisted that the application was directly tampering with my operating system and blew the application to kingdom come, and let's be frank; my anti-virus wasn't wrong. When you reach the second playthrough, the game starts playing with your system processes, such as giving you an error window saying "I SEE YOU", and then opening a text file in notepad saying "I HATE YOU". Now, you can say that these were simply files in the game folders that were being accessed via script, and that would be true, but if that's ALL they were doing, my AVG wouldn't have gone Rambo and auto deleted the game (at least it was nice enough to let me know it wasn't giving me a choice.). As interesting as this game is, this is a huge strike against it.

The story is intriguing and the creep factor is excellent. I find it very distressing that I couldn't enjoy this game as much as I would have liked to.

Gameplay: Very simple. You look for things, and there isn't really anything to find except for normal household items. When you find certain things, such as the bear or the note, you trigger an insta-death that leads you to the continue screen. From there, you move on to the next part of the game. The insta-deaths aren't really insta-deaths, but a transition to the next playthrough; sort of a Groundhog's Day formula.

Graphics: Standard RTP.

Music: The title screen plays a piano piece that tricks the player into thinking he or she is playing a simple fluff game. Once in the game, there is no party, and there is no birthday cake. Once you get into the game, you start with silence, and have the choice to play a song on the record player. I only ever got the chance to hear Paper Doll.

Conclusion: What I saw was interesting and well made, but I've never had my anti-virus software react that aggressively to a program before. I don't think it would have done anything. It was probably just messing with settings to use fourth wall freak outs to scare me, but I won't take that chance on a second download, and I can't recommend you take that chance the first time. As much as I'd like to say that the game is worth playing, I simply can't recommend installing any program that triggers anti-virus software like that. If you want to play a game that could possibly trigger a nuclear protocol in your anti-virus, that's entirely your business. It has, at the very least, taught me to be a bit more careful about what I download from the game pages in the future. What I saw probably would have gotten a three and a half out of me. An inability to finish the game coupled with the reason for my inability to finish it drops this down to a two. Now, Partytime did contact me because he wanted a review that counteracted Marrend's low score. I apologize for that, but these are all things that affect the game experience, and I found the impact to be quite negative.