Next up is the inexplicable adventure/dating sim/choose your own adventure title Bionic Heart, by Tycoon Games. In the continuum of indie-developed games for the Mac, there is a range of quality from the ridiculous to the sublime. Bionic Heart definitely falls to one side of that equation, and I'll leave it to you to determine which.

You play the part of Luke Black, a skilled worker (skilled at what? we never find out) at a company called "Nanotech", which is the very subtle nod at the fact that the company creates nanotechnology. This fact is quickly mentioned once, then never brought up again, which is too bad because it might have offered some interest, quite unlike the entire rest of the game.

You see, Bionic Heart suffers from what you might call "Resident Evil-itis". This is to say, it features some laughably bad writing, in both exposition and dialogue. There's little doubt that the creators are non-native English speakers, because of the kind of weird grammatical and syntactical errors committed. People familiar with phrases like "the master of unlocking" will feel right at home with the tone presented here.

Here are a couple of choice snippets: " ... the warnings sent out by some groups of scientists in the 21st century ... "; " ... luckily, or maybe unfortunately ... "; and my favorite: "Unfortunately, such visions ended up disturbing Luke's mind, who was internated [sic] in a clinic and then officially declared crazy."

Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Black, we've been forced to declare your son officially crazy. It's a technical term; you wouldn't understand.

Oddly enough, there is little to recommend outside of the awful English, so its greatest liability also becomes its greatest asset. After a while, you learn to relax and just let it happen to you.

For the greater part of an estimated fifteen minutes post-start, the game consists of nothing but clicking the left mouse button to advance the narrative, which is presented with full voiceover. Every bit of text, narrative or dialogue, is spoken with voiceover. This would be a worthwhile achievement, if the acting weren't equally execrable, commensurate with the level of writing. There's something about horrible voiceover acting that's difficult to describe, but immediately apparent. It has something to do with misplaced emphasis on the wrong syllables, and is hard to deliberately imitate.

The setting is a future London, which is surprising when you discover that no one living there speaks with any kind of English accent. The architecture is sort of a faux-Blade Runneresque aesthetic with elements of Tron thrown in for no good reason. The characters are rendered in an anime-like style, which helps convince the player that they're playing some sort of dating sim, which I assume is the point of the game, considering that some of the only non-dialogue feedback comes in the form of a small "Relationship status" meter that appears after you're allowed to make a decision, which isn't nearly enough to avoid annoyed boredom.

Bionic Heart is an extremely wearisome game, from the interminable dialogue to the frustrating changes in point of view (the narrator goes from speaking of himself in the first person to later saying "you" do this and "you" do that without any legitimate reason for the change). The plot is hackneyed, the opportunities for legitimate interest completely ignored, and the interface similarly lacking. You really have to download that game and check it out for yourself, which you can do right here on Big Download, for both Mac and PC.