I'm sorry to admit that I ultimately didn't have a good time with this. This was something I was very excited for - I used to read a ton of webcomics back in high school/college, and Dinosaur Comics was one of my favorites. Arguably low-effort, since half the work is already done, but it largely goes to highlight Ryan North's strengths as a comedy writer - unfettered and zany, where T-Rex is pure id and Utahraptor is pure superego (and Dromeciomimus is nice). When the physical book version of the project that would ultimately become this game was announced, I was ecstatic. "Choose Your Own Adventure" Hamlet is a great high concept, the elevator pitch joke of "this is the original story; Shakespeare took a single route and plagarized it for his play" is terrific, and the idea that a bunch of my favorite webcomic artists were tapped to do ending pictures was a coooool collaboration of efforts. I always wanted to pick up the physical book, but it never really ended up happening.
Instead, a couple years later, a visual novel adaptation came out, and a friend bought it for me on Steam. Super cool!
But I'll be honest, I think the project loses something in the shift from physical to digital media. Surprisingly, it's the lack of saves, something that only indirectly exists in physical form. In my experiences with Choose Your Own Adventure stories (well, okay, Give Yourself Goosebumps stories - CYOA proper was before my time), sticking a finger in a page so you can quickly flip back on a bad ending, as well as breezing through the first few choices on a reread, makes for a huge part of the experience. After a while, you're revisiting pages only to hit upon those choices, so your downtime between being engaged by the narrative is shortlived.
I would've thought that this would be a no-brainer for a visual novel treatment, but surprisingly not. You can eventually unlock bookmarks that skip ahead to designated points in characters' storylines, but there is otherwise no way to create checkpoints within this story's flow. I'd been spoiled by Umineko and Ren'Py projects like Katawa Shoujo that let you save wherever, so it was a huge shock that, every time I wanted to try a different split in the branching path, I'd have to sit through a lot of the same rambling comedy writing over and over again. There's a vocal narration as well, and while the narrator does a fine enough job, I had to disable him after a while because I was reading way faster than he was. This was before I'd even started on the rereads; I can't imagine what it would've been like having to re-listen to his delivery on each new round.
I... also don't like this iteration's treatment of Ophelia. So, in a bid to reclaim Ophelia as a feminist icon, Ryan North grafted an entirely new personality onto her, which reveals itself as you go off the beaten path of the original story: she's now a brilliant chemist, looking to invent rocket science three-and-a-half centuries early. Lest you get the wrong idea, I'm not opposed to 'reclaiming' characters like this or adding a more modern feminist perspective to retellings of classic stories - in fact, I think a lot of the fun of retelling stories comes from the change in perspective each new storyteller has. As a throwaway example, I like how "Zorro: The Chronicles" (which I only know from the video game adaptation) gives Diego a twin sister; Ines supporting and occasionally taking on the mantle of the Fox feels like a very natural way of adding a female perspective to the traditional Zorro narrative. I've also seen a version of The Tempest that portrayed Prospero as a woman (and not just the one in Life is Strange: Before the Storm!), which does a lot to recontextualize her relationship with Miranda and Ariel.
In contrast, making Ophelia a proto-rocket scientist is cute, but I'm not a fan of how it's done here since it completely ignores the character's themes from the original play. Ophelia in the play is a tragic character torn between her love for Hamlet and her love for her father Polonius, and her cognitive dissonance in being forced to choose between one or the other drives her mad. There's a natural commentary baked into this character, such that she's inspired countless interpretations and reinterpretations by actors and other artists alike. There is no real attempt to address this aspect of her personality here. Ophelia is given no reason to love her father, and in fact the narration makes no bones about how much of a jerk he is. Hamlet is also put on blast as a boyfriend - it's been a while since I've gone through this version of the story, so I don't remember if any development is given to explore their relationship, such that would redress or reconstruct a relationship for them in light of the criticism this narration poses. What I do remember is, if you try to follow along with the original play's narrative (because remember - the joke is that Shakespeare read a single route of this CYOA novel and based the play around it), inevitably the narrator gets so incensed about the choices you're making that he calls YOU out for being a bad person, then confiscates Ophelia as a point-of-view character. Given that the story goes to the trouble of marking the canonical path with little Yorick skull icons, I can't help but feel like it's trying to do the Spec Ops: The Line thing of calling the player out for their participation in something morally reprehensible. Only Spec Ops is trying to create a conversation around its own medium and genre, while To Be Or Not To Be distrusts the reader's ability to critically examine things from a modern perspective and engages in thought-terminating agrumentum ad hominem in a bid to pwn sexism.
And it'd be fine - not really my thing, but fine - if this sort of critical treatment was universally leveled against the play as a whole, or if the whole cast was presented as OCs with only nominal ties to the source material. But Hamlet's characterization is clearly an attempt to be consistent with the play, as his characteristic indecisiveness (1) is implicit on a metatextual level through the medium of a CYOA novel and (2) plays into the non-canonical scenarios introduced here. I just find Ophelia's treatment to be at odds with the work's own mission statement.
But there are good segments in here. It's always fun to see what's done with the play-in-a-play in any given Hamlet adaptation, and turning it into an MS Paint Adventures-style interlude is a great touch. I must assume the subplot of Hamlet murdering Polonius and trying to dispose of his corpse was a creation for this video game adaptation, given the abrupt switch to a classic Zork-esque text parser. The swashbuckling pirate adventure interlude - and the narration's insistence that all of this definitely happened within the text of the original work, complete with Yorick skulls - is the one bit of literary criticism I think really works here. And getting all the different web comic artists' contributions was of course a nice complement to the rest of the work, and an effective incentive to keep playing.
...still, I must admit that this largely turned me off on Ryan North's projects. The follow-up work, Romeo and/or Juliet, while possessing a truly incredible title, looked to be doing the exact same thing - so I gave it a pass. I ended up falling off Dinosaur Comics after that, and I'm sad to say that I haven't really sought out anything else he's worked on. I hear good things about a lot of his more recent stuff - always been curious about his treatment on Squirrel Girl in particular, since she seems like a character perfectly in line with his writing sensibilities - but I just haven't had the ooph to look into it. Sorry, this one wasn't for me.
Instead, a couple years later, a visual novel adaptation came out, and a friend bought it for me on Steam. Super cool!
But I'll be honest, I think the project loses something in the shift from physical to digital media. Surprisingly, it's the lack of saves, something that only indirectly exists in physical form. In my experiences with Choose Your Own Adventure stories (well, okay, Give Yourself Goosebumps stories - CYOA proper was before my time), sticking a finger in a page so you can quickly flip back on a bad ending, as well as breezing through the first few choices on a reread, makes for a huge part of the experience. After a while, you're revisiting pages only to hit upon those choices, so your downtime between being engaged by the narrative is shortlived.
I would've thought that this would be a no-brainer for a visual novel treatment, but surprisingly not. You can eventually unlock bookmarks that skip ahead to designated points in characters' storylines, but there is otherwise no way to create checkpoints within this story's flow. I'd been spoiled by Umineko and Ren'Py projects like Katawa Shoujo that let you save wherever, so it was a huge shock that, every time I wanted to try a different split in the branching path, I'd have to sit through a lot of the same rambling comedy writing over and over again. There's a vocal narration as well, and while the narrator does a fine enough job, I had to disable him after a while because I was reading way faster than he was. This was before I'd even started on the rereads; I can't imagine what it would've been like having to re-listen to his delivery on each new round.
I... also don't like this iteration's treatment of Ophelia. So, in a bid to reclaim Ophelia as a feminist icon, Ryan North grafted an entirely new personality onto her, which reveals itself as you go off the beaten path of the original story: she's now a brilliant chemist, looking to invent rocket science three-and-a-half centuries early. Lest you get the wrong idea, I'm not opposed to 'reclaiming' characters like this or adding a more modern feminist perspective to retellings of classic stories - in fact, I think a lot of the fun of retelling stories comes from the change in perspective each new storyteller has. As a throwaway example, I like how "Zorro: The Chronicles" (which I only know from the video game adaptation) gives Diego a twin sister; Ines supporting and occasionally taking on the mantle of the Fox feels like a very natural way of adding a female perspective to the traditional Zorro narrative. I've also seen a version of The Tempest that portrayed Prospero as a woman (and not just the one in Life is Strange: Before the Storm!), which does a lot to recontextualize her relationship with Miranda and Ariel.
In contrast, making Ophelia a proto-rocket scientist is cute, but I'm not a fan of how it's done here since it completely ignores the character's themes from the original play. Ophelia in the play is a tragic character torn between her love for Hamlet and her love for her father Polonius, and her cognitive dissonance in being forced to choose between one or the other drives her mad. There's a natural commentary baked into this character, such that she's inspired countless interpretations and reinterpretations by actors and other artists alike. There is no real attempt to address this aspect of her personality here. Ophelia is given no reason to love her father, and in fact the narration makes no bones about how much of a jerk he is. Hamlet is also put on blast as a boyfriend - it's been a while since I've gone through this version of the story, so I don't remember if any development is given to explore their relationship, such that would redress or reconstruct a relationship for them in light of the criticism this narration poses. What I do remember is, if you try to follow along with the original play's narrative (because remember - the joke is that Shakespeare read a single route of this CYOA novel and based the play around it), inevitably the narrator gets so incensed about the choices you're making that he calls YOU out for being a bad person, then confiscates Ophelia as a point-of-view character. Given that the story goes to the trouble of marking the canonical path with little Yorick skull icons, I can't help but feel like it's trying to do the Spec Ops: The Line thing of calling the player out for their participation in something morally reprehensible. Only Spec Ops is trying to create a conversation around its own medium and genre, while To Be Or Not To Be distrusts the reader's ability to critically examine things from a modern perspective and engages in thought-terminating agrumentum ad hominem in a bid to pwn sexism.
And it'd be fine - not really my thing, but fine - if this sort of critical treatment was universally leveled against the play as a whole, or if the whole cast was presented as OCs with only nominal ties to the source material. But Hamlet's characterization is clearly an attempt to be consistent with the play, as his characteristic indecisiveness (1) is implicit on a metatextual level through the medium of a CYOA novel and (2) plays into the non-canonical scenarios introduced here. I just find Ophelia's treatment to be at odds with the work's own mission statement.
But there are good segments in here. It's always fun to see what's done with the play-in-a-play in any given Hamlet adaptation, and turning it into an MS Paint Adventures-style interlude is a great touch. I must assume the subplot of Hamlet murdering Polonius and trying to dispose of his corpse was a creation for this video game adaptation, given the abrupt switch to a classic Zork-esque text parser. The swashbuckling pirate adventure interlude - and the narration's insistence that all of this definitely happened within the text of the original work, complete with Yorick skulls - is the one bit of literary criticism I think really works here. And getting all the different web comic artists' contributions was of course a nice complement to the rest of the work, and an effective incentive to keep playing.
...still, I must admit that this largely turned me off on Ryan North's projects. The follow-up work, Romeo and/or Juliet, while possessing a truly incredible title, looked to be doing the exact same thing - so I gave it a pass. I ended up falling off Dinosaur Comics after that, and I'm sad to say that I haven't really sought out anything else he's worked on. I hear good things about a lot of his more recent stuff - always been curious about his treatment on Squirrel Girl in particular, since she seems like a character perfectly in line with his writing sensibilities - but I just haven't had the ooph to look into it. Sorry, this one wasn't for me.