When scanning the list of games, this one leapt out at me. For one thing, it has a great title (I can't help reading "Everybody Dies!" as a cheery announcement), and for another, I was curious as to what the Punk Points guy had been up to.
So this was the first game I played, and straight away I was hooked by a brilliant piece of characterisation. The PC's behaviour, his anecdotes, his attitude — the author has simply nailed down this supermarket metalhead, perfectly capturing a type without ever slipping into a stereotype. It would have been all too easy to portray "Graham" as simply a loser, but Everybody Dies takes a more skillful, subtler approach. It doesn't condescend to the guy, it sees things from his point of view, so that he emerges as an oddly likeable character, a shithead with dignity. This is good stuff.
To some extent, the rest of this short game coasts by on the power of its opening section. The other player characterisations are more subdued and seem weaker: I didn't believe as much in Ranni or Lisa, the "virgins" line of the former striking me as particularly inauthentic. And did we really need an irredeemably evil cartoon racist psycho to show up? The story is nice, but ends too abruptly, and leaves a lot of questions. Why did these people get more chances? Why did they have to be saved? The story could do with more work to make it tighter and more unified. The fates of the characters don't seem as closely bound as they might be. Once Ranni fishes the shopping cart out of the river, isn't Graham off the hook?
None of these issues would have stood out so much if the game hadn't
set itself such a high standard to begin with. Nor would I have been as
bothered by the bugs I found — the first/second-person lapses, the
repeated actions in VERBOSE room descriptions, the weirdness when you
neither show the blade nor hide it — which a hundred-odd beta
testers somehow missed. The programming needs an extra bit of polish to
bring it up to the level of the prose and illustrations.
I really like the illustrations, which have a simple woodcut quality about them, and lend the story the quality of a fable. The fish-within-fish images bring to mind Brueghel's engraving "Big Fish Eat Little Fish", but they and the story seem to argue against the pessimism of this well-known proverb. Everyone Dies shows that it's not simply a fish-eat-fish world out there: big fish eat little ones, sure, but sometimes fish cooperate. The fates of all fish, big and little, are intertwined: sometimes they need each other to help them out of difficulty.
Rating: 7 (Though voted 10, as my favourite game of the competition.)