Reviews by jakomo

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.

A neat 500-word short story from 1916 about a skinflint who suddenly becomes generous, now in the public domain so available for reproduction. The modern co-author adds an impressive cover art image and a short bonus section in the middle of the story, where the interactivity lies. A text-box lets you type an appropriate noun to end a sentence. Contextually, this should presumably be a synonym for "miser" but it also allows many other words (and will tell you if it doesn't recognize what you type). The result is a short chunk of text with one line of dialogue altered depending on what you wrote. It then proceeds with the rest of the story, unaltered and unaffected by this little interactive detour.

Why the extra section is presented in a different form to the rest of the story (a play script instead of prose) is difficult to fathom. Why this interactive section is supposed to elevate the original short story is equally difficult to fathom. As an overall concept, there is potential in a twine-like choice-based system that hides the explicit choices behind a type-what-you-want text-box, but it definitely requires a longer work, with multiple choices that matter, to do it justice.

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.