To Be or Not to Be Direct Download
The greatest work in English literature, now in the greatest format of English literature: a chooseable-path adventure! William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has finally been restored to its original second-person non-linear branching narrative format. Now it’s up to YOU to decide what happens next. Play as Hamlet and revenge your father’s death. Play as Ophelia and make scientific discoveries. Play as King Hamlet, Sr. and die on the first page! To Be or Not To Be is the video game version of Ryan North’s chose-your-own-adventure novel, To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure as a parody version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Aside utilizing the names and events of the original storyline for a setting – and paraphrasing the book now and then – this is nothing even slightly close to the original work. If you have never read or watched the play, I strongly recommend doing so before venturing into this cheesy spoof.
I’ve always been a bit of a fan for chose-your-own-adventure format, exploring various courses of actions and their consequences presented for a singular story. I basically grew up reading them, playing on the notion of a choice action. Also becoming a fan of Shakespeare’s all works as my age and experience in English language progressed enough for me to appreciate them; this game felt like a natural choice for me. Well… this wasn’t what I expected. As the narration starts, you are given the opportunity to play the game as Hamlet, Ophelia or Hamlet Sr. a.k.a. King of Denmark, exploring 110 various parody paths and their endings harboring cringe and insult comedy, narrated in modern slang mostly. It’s a cute and imaginative game to spare some mindless time with, sure but nothing exceptionally rich I must say. You start playing the game with a silent smirk on your face, scoffing now and then, deepening that smirk into a smile. It has its almost hilarious moments too, mostly presented in situational comedy through written narrative. It works for 2-3 playthroughs. Yet, as you keep playing and keep witnessing the same kind of shallow remarks for the 30th time, the game quickly loses its charm.
To Be or Not to Be Direct Play:
I must confess that the humor presented here was not my cup of tea. It is mostly rough parody and elementary satire, downright underrating the brilliance of the original author by taking crude logic and blatant exaggeration as its weapons. It’s not a traditional or psychological reading of the concept. It’s an absurd and cheesy parody of the norms of the era, story path choices, gender representations, free-will itself and character interrelations. The relationship between the player and the narrator is somewhat of a semblance to The Stanley Parable with the narrator constantly criticizing you, intervening with your choices and rearranging actions to fit into prearranged storyline format.
Screenshots
System Requirements
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows XP SP3
- Processor: 2 GHz dual core
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Hardware Accelerated Graphics with dedicated memory
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Click the Download Here button above and you should be redirected to GamesDatabase.
- Wait 5 seconds and click on the grey ‘download now’ button. Now let the download begin and wait for it to finish.
- Once the game is done downloading, right click the .zip file and click on “Extract to” (To do this you must have 7-Zip or winrar, which you can get here).
- Double click inside the To Be or Not to Be folder and run the exe application.
- Thats all, enjoy the game! Make sure to run the game as administrator and if you get any missing dll errors, look for a file named All In One Runtimes.exe run this and install it.
