Reviews by jakomo

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.

The latest from Damon L Wakes, whose personal brand of flippant, off-the-wall humour is fully on display in this Twine optimization puzzle. You're a ghost with the most, and you're here to say, humans in your home, you don't dig it - no way! You've got six hours to make your abode as uninviting as possible before the new resident shows up. Each possible action has a differing spookiness quotient, but also has a differing amount of time to prepare it. Will you spend hours creating poltergeist activity in the kitchen, only to run out of time to make the lights flicker in the porch? Lots of different endings depending on your final score out of ten, all very sharp and amusing, as you'd expect from the author of such loopy delights as Good Grub! and GUNBABY.

Bind, Torture, Klll Simulator 2022. You play the serial killer, with your victim narrating their own torture and murder to you as it happens: but it's clearly a voice in your head, as they describe the long drawn out torture as almost a consensual sexual coupling between the two of you, something they want and actively seek, and their eventual murder as a "martyrdom". Unless you screw up the "ritual" of course, then prepare to be berated and verbally abused. Strong meat, especially as the game never breaks out of the killer's gaze, there is no framing device, no switches to other perspectives. Just a single changing word in a hyperlink seems to betray the unreliability of these words. Very well presented, utilising colour, speed and positioning of text as further markers of utter derangement.