Ratings and Reviews by baezil

Putting this up top in case the author sees it-- the link in passage Dogs13 is bugged, something with the bold text, and I had to DL and edit to progress!

Okay review time... I was happy to do this because this was really up my dark and creepy alley. This is a spooky-fun bedtime story for adults, a distillation of halloween specials and novelty songs presented with a unique and consistent authorial voice. It's silly, creepy, funny, laser targeted to my personal preferences for goofy IF. This one isn't as overtly ambitious as a behemoth parser, but it's doing five different things, doing them all really well, and tying them together in a single aesthetically coherent experience. It's still early days for the comp, and I haven't played a ton of games, but I loved this game a lot, and it'll be hard to unseat this as my current fav of IF Comp 2026.

Travel back with me to the relatively early internet. I’m 14. I spend my daily allotted hour of dial-up internet time split between Runescape and a Lord of the Rings-themed geocities message board built by a friend. There are maybe seven members (it’s invite-only); we use it to write nerdy roleplays, none of which we finish, and discuss the books/movies on which those nerdy Rps are based. At the time I’m horribly in love with the friend who made the site (I’ll be in love with them for another couple years; I’ll never do a thing about it). Meanwhile, one of the other members apparently has a crush on me, starts causing drama with the site creator in some kind of misguided rivalry. Parents get involved, it’s all weird and embarrassing, friendships end, and our little geocities site, like Middle Earth in the third age, enters its sad decline.

I really enjoyed Quackpond. It’s such an effective speedrun of this experience. The fact that you play as someone peripheral to the core relationships is so smart; most of the time, you were a bystander to this sort of thing, only realizing way too late how serious and messy and totally out of your hands the whole thing was. This is an experience that even younger folks will recognize; how many Discord servers have died this death? The difference is that back in my early teens, that there was no discord; these small communities had to be built, and a lot of us didn’t know how to do that. You relied on people who could code, or who knew html, and though friendships sometimes survived on larger forums or various IM services, most of the time these sites were like deep sea vents. When they went dark, the communities that had clustered around them just died out. We talk a lot these days about the internet being so corpo, and it’s true, but any ownership of the early web required skills that not everyone had. Enshittification still happened, in a way, but instead of ads it was immaturity, jealousy, resentment, poorly handled feelings or neurodivergence that made a site unusable. As soon as I saw the post about the site shuttered I had just enough time to go look at my duck (Doodle, a grey muscovy) one last time; I tried to play with him, got that final error. Ouch.

I love the way this game works. The gameplay is slight, but it works well, never overstays its welcome. I overuse “well calibrated” as a descriptor of small games, but this one is well calibrated, the perfect length to say what it’s saying, just enough variation in what your clicking on to hide the fact that you are just clicking on links. Writing and design are great, it was funny (there was always a duck song guy; the geocities creator’s brother was a duck song guy, actually, by which I mean he incessantly referenced that specific duck song), it made me genuinely sad. Great stuff!

In Thirst For Blood, you’re a mosquito looking to drink some egg-nourishing blood. The premise presents interesting challenges for the author: how to describe and navigate the vertical aspects of a mosquito’s world, how to present the PoV, what challenges to give the player.

The mechanics of the game were pretty simple: navigate, examine. The implementation is variable— smell indicates the direction of CO2 concentration, a description of a poster changes after examination, but a necklace is mentioned that doesn’t seem to exist, and the taste of the skin is referenced but “taste skin” gets you a default response. You can’t actively bite; it’s just something that happens after you enter a specific room; I wanted to be actively bite the human! I liked the vertical aspect of the environment, and I liked that it didn’t always clearly map. (You have to go up, s, and then down to get to the neck, and can’t get there by just going S from the mid-height room.) It felt like the way a flying insect might map out safe flight paths. The directions weren’t consistently signaled, sometimes included in the room description and sometimes not mentioned at all, but overall it was fairly hard to get lost.

The ostensible goal here is to get blood, but there’s a sort of hidden goal that carries most of the game’s content. A points system encourages the player to explore entirely bloodless items, and while I like the concept of revealing what’s really happening through examining objects, but I’m not sold on how to game handles mosquito PoV. We aren’t really inhabiting a naturalistic version of a mosquito’s sensory or cognitive world, but we don’t get much characterization of the mosquito as an insectoid person, either. For example, gas concentration and heat are part of descriptions, but descriptions are still primarily visual. Mosquitos aren’t blind, but their visuals are attuned to IR/heat sources and are affected by smell; when you mistake a poster for a hole in the wall, through which you can see distant nude humans, it’s an unlikely mistake for a real squeeter to make. At one point you can read and interpret bloodwork results. Mosquitos being born as expert phlebotomists is funny, but later when you try to pick up a jewel you’re told it’s too heavy and "that’s not something an insect usually does.” Mosquitos don’t usually see a dolphin plush and reminisce about their own aquatic larval days, don’t recognize diamond cutters and lament that no one will listen to their true crime theories because they’re just a bug, either, though. And while you recognize these things, and have some thoughts about them, there’s no characterization. Forget the how of it all, why does this mosquito care? Does she have opinions about it?

IMO, the game would’ve worked for me a little more if it had either committed to the classic “critter that recognizes and has thoughts about human stuff” bit OR leaned into the dramatic irony of a mosquito who doesn’t understand much of what she encounters but which we, the players, are able to recognize.

Overall, the concept is fun, it’s a mosquito-bite-sized little experience, and I always love to see an invertebrate protagonist. This is the sort of project that while not entirely successful in its current form, could really shine with a little more attention. I'd love to see a post-comp update.

I was about halfway through when I started to suspect we weren’t actually going to see any of the eponymous objects. This VN keeps you at a distance, which reinforces the concepts in the story. We don’t see the objects, and only one is described in any detail. We never get the full context and tone of the relationships (the narrator themselves doesn’t fully understand their mother’s relationship to Carmen). Some of this is vague on purpose, some should probably be clarified a little more: there are times when I couldn’t tell if the back and forth between the narrator and their mother was meant to be playful or tense, e.g.

That distance mostly serves the story, though, because no one in this story is entirely present: not the narrator, who didn’t know Carmen and doesn’t understand the effect Carmen’s death has had on their mother; not their mother, who can’t remember what she’s looking for, who insists she knew all of Carmen despite evidence to the contrary; and not Carmen. Carmen is here, of course. The relationship and spaces we make are a part of us, and those parts don’t disappear when we die. People linger. Part of Carmen IS here. The narrator’s mother says “I can see her… she’s in there. She can hear me,” but then “why can’t she say anything back? Why can she only listen?” That presence is unsettling because it’s a recognizable but unresponsive, already dissipating. That dissipation is the most frightening thing in this haunted house; Carmen’s empty bedroom sends the narrator’s mom running from the house.

What we do see is really lovely. Looking at this VN is a delight. The colors and textures, and surreal collage elements that blend photorealism and almost crayon-like softness, the switch between vague impressions (the surreal garden, the party streamers, the mostly faceless mother against a background made only of shapeless colors) and moments of incredible but meaningless specificity (a worn, stained wood step; ductwork and wires), it all heightens the sense of being only partially present in a place or situation.

There were places where the writing didn’t quite work for me, where it overplays its hand, particularly this passage: “Was I there, too? At the jaws of the labyrinth? I think I was. The bramble was enough to cover the whole world. The orchestra played at a distance. There were no birds in the sky. And yet, even in hell there were surprises.” That ‘and yet’ will bug me, and some of the metaphors are too on the nose (“She hid everything in her maze”; the eclipse, an absence that you can’t look at directly, that defamiliarizes the world around you). And yet… this VN works far more often than it doesn’t, and the visual presentation alone is worth the short time it takes to read.