Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

Choicescript tale of the nautical and the supernatural. You're a Byzantine-era ship captain at a party (where everyone talks in rhyme), recounting a weird event where your ship inexplicably stopped moving and a female passenger seemed to be the sole cause. The story is compelling, the moral choices you're given are interesting, and it wisely leaves the biggest mysteries unexplained. It's only disappointing that the rhyming gimmick set up in the framing device isn't carried over into the main story: would have loved to read this tale entirely in verse.

You're a shrink talking to a murderer in a Russian prison: initially about himself, then moving on to his murders, and then his own family. The killer has a really strong voice: sweary, belligerent, self-consciously confrontational. Heavy-duty dialogue like (Spoiler - click to show)"Push your dick into a million whores, you will never know what it feels like to push yourself into another man's brain, past his broken skull." He seems to revel in his violence, but, as the player-character points out early on, it's likely just a mask. You can let him talk freely or interject with your own questions. Written in Ink, a basic no-frills implementation. Works literally, as a frightening character study, but can also be read symbolically, as a metaphor for the historical traumas suffered by the Russian empire that brought it to its current precarious state.

Does exactly what it says on the tin. You're a surprisingly high-functioning zombie, who speaks like Grunk in Lost Pig, munching on human brain and posting an online review. Simple choice-based silliness. Here's a sample: "ME VERY SMART. ME ONCE EAT BRAINS OF MAN WHO ME BELIEVE WAS BESTSELL AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL!!!” Like the zombie's victim, completely disposable, but tasty while it lasts.

Hypertext poetry. A portrait of obsessive, excessive, limitless love. Or is it? The vivid, lascivious imagery offers an interesting thematic counterpart to the other Ectocomp 2022 entry, MARTYR ME, that also displays a similar co-mingling of sex and unexpected violence amid a sense of unreality. Is there something in the air? Ectocomp is horny this year. The story is strictly linear, with hyperlinks popping up annotation windows that offer further expansion on the link text. In fact, the whole work could be reproduced as a regular static poem, using the standard superscript numbering scheme to denote in-line footnotes and listing the annotations, sequentially, as a numbered list beneath the main body. Would be fun to see something like that in a trad printed poetry anthology one day.

Text message interactive fiction: chat with your mum, and with your pal Ash with whom you've been reading Ancient Tomes, while a relentlessly oppressive musical drone churns in the background. The text interface simulacrum effectively induces dread through extremely slow reveals of each... new... message... and the few choices you get to make, although inconsequential, help characterise the protagonist and elaborate her thoughts beyond the conversations themselves. A highly linear creepypasta-ish experience which appears to be the final part of a trilogy: having not played the previous two I can confirm this works perfectly well as a nightmarish standalone experience.

I'm now officially HSL Certified! Just passed an online health & safety exam for Haunted Scissor-Lift operation with a score of 28/35, and feel ready and raring to go... This is a Choicescript-based sequence of 35 questions that perfectly imitate the patronising, jargon-filled language of these kinds of online H&S quizzes but throws in a supernatural twist, a la SCP Foundation, where the humour comes from the the disjunction between the wildly magickal fantasy/horror stuff and the ultra-mundane health&safety regulation stuff. This made me laugh out loud: "Before you are two goblins. One always lies, the other always tells the truth. Both claim to be your supervisor and suggest that you follow them to your haunted worksite." 35 questions is probably too much, the first 10 questions gently ease you into this world, the last 10 are where all the really funny, silly, creative stuff lies, but the middle 15 could probably be trimmed for pacing reasons. On the other hand, I understand the need for it to be as tedious as the real thing for the whole effect to work. The "Haunted Scissor Lift Manual" is a separate download, I'd also like to see that somehow incorporated into the main body of the game itself as it's filled with good bonus material.

Stop me if you've heard this one: a young lady, newly married, goes to live at her new husband's estate. Creepy goings-on in her new home ensue, and she comes to doubt the integrity of the man she has married. Something Blue puts a neat spin on this hoary old tale by presenting it as a series of letters from the new bride to her sister, in a classical 1800s literary style. You get to "edit" each letter before sending, by changing a sentence here and there. It's interesting how such a relatively small amount of change can really affect the character of the heroine, and therefore the tone of the whole story. She can be fearful and suspicious from the start, making a grim, E.A. Poe-like psychological study, or naive and optimistic to (almost) the end, making a sedate M.R. James-esque ghost story. I encountered two endings, there may be more.

Ingenious time-loop puzzle box in which you whizz through a sequence of cyclical inter-linked nightmare scenarios trying to escape to wakefulness. A dense thicket of choices await you at each turn, as you seek the critical clues from one dream to help free yourself from another. Impressively captures that bewildering yet hyper-real feeling of free-association during a vivid dream to a tee.

Gather your allies and venture forth to fight monsters... but you're also a regular teen at a Halloween party, and your allies are your family and friends. Recruitment consists of negotiating choice-based conversations with each of your friends taking into account their specific personality traits. Battle consists of turn-based RPG style combat. Well-written and intriguing lore, lots of mysteries to explore: what are these protoplasmic entities? Who exactly are you, why are you able to read minds, why can only your crew fight these creatures? And how does it relate to the "pre-war" Harry Potter-esque book series that your friends chatter about? None of these mysteries are answered though, as the game simply ends after your first fight. Appears to be a teaser for a future project and not a complete game in its current form, so would be better placed in Introcomp.

The technological Singularity has arrived, and has decided the human race needs to be deleted. But has very kindly given us a week's notice to get our affairs in order first. You're a writer in a new town, deciding each day whether to knuckle down and write your final masterpiece, or go out and experience the sights, sounds and people of your neighbourhood as they come to terms with the approaching apocalypse. Essentially, this is two separate narratives that require you to go "all in" on one route to experience the stories to their conclusions. Trying to alternate between writing days and going out days simply yields two half-completed stories instead of one full one when your time runs out. Which mechanically fits with the central theme of Blackout: you can't do everything, there just isn't enough time. This is either intended as a broad life lesson: "life is more satisfactory when you can focus on what you know you can achieve rather than what society says you should achieve", or a darkly comic metaphor about writer's block and missing deadlines.