Ratings and Reviews by Zed
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Your time-powers manifest the moment before a nuclear explosion will kill all of the heroes and villains battling in the abandoned amusement park (where you'd been observing as the plucky reporter that you are). Time is frozen for everyone but you and you need to figure out how to save everyone, aided by your aftersight (seeing the past of your location) and foresight (seeing a future event).
Everyone else being frozen, there's no personal interaction with the characters, but there's still characterization in the form of the situations you find them in (and your own notes in your reporter's notebook), making for a fun implied setting and cast.
Not Just Once is a well-written creepypasta choice game. There seem to be just two endings, so functionally there’s just one choice: play it safe, or keep playing it risky. Try it both ways.
There are some bugs. One time through, passages referred to past events that hadn’t happened; another time I was left stuck with no choices at all, thus no way forward. But because I was planning to review it, I played several times, and most play-throughs were fine so your odds are good.
Overall I enjoyed it and recommend giving it a try.
How Dare You? has a cringeworthy premise: you show up at the home of our partner, Heron, who communicates very clearly that it’s over and you should leave. Yet…
…No, you can’t. You’ve got to convince em to change eir mind. You just have to show em how much ey means to you. How much you care.
You refuse to leave. The game requires you to try to win Heron over. It won’t let you leave prior to making some sufficiently dramatic gesture (and it’s a parser game, so you don’t know the options).
From the opening, we get strong hints that Heron had good reason to call it quits, and this is borne out by the options available to us, our internal dialogue about the situation, and Heron’s reactions.
If this were a romcom, you could probably turn things around: an egregious disregard for boundaries at the final act climax is always a winning move. But this was written for the Love/Violence Jam and the Anti-Romance Jam 2024.
The cringeyness of the premise and ugliness of the situation is redeemed in that it does end badly. The story doesn’t sugar-coat toxic behavior and pretend it’s sweet: it recognizes the toxicity, which is refreshing.
It’s an extremely quick bite-sized story and worth a few play-throughs.
The myth of Andromeda has inspired many artists, owing to the enduring appeal of naked chicks in bondage. The backstory:
Andromeda, princess of Aethiopia, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia is minding her own business when Mom boasts that she's more beautiful than the Nereids, Nereus' sea nymph daughters. This doesn't pose any credible threat to the Nereids' brand, but the Nereids and Nereus are colleagues of Poseidon's, so out of some sort of classically divine professional courtesy, he goes all wrathful on Aethiopia, flooding it or siccing the sea monster Cetus on it, or maybe both. The Oracle of Ammon (Egyptian god crossover event!) says the only thing to do to save the country is to sacrifice Andromeda to Cetus. So Cepheus shackles her naked to a rock to await her fate. (By no account did the Oracle specify the naked part, that was apparently just Cepheus' own creative vision for what a sea monster would find tasty.)
Getting involved with the gods is sort of like global thermonuclear war, but worse: the only way to win is for your whole family not to play.
Anyway, the soundtrack starts playing Holding Out for a Hero and Perseus shows up.
Perseus had just offed Medusa, having been personally accoutred by the gods, so he's got the sickest loadout in all of classical mythdom:
- Hermes' winged sandals
- Hades' helm of darkness (granting invisibility)
- Athena's harpe sword
And now he has all that and Medusa's head in a bag! (Truly, we have no clue whether Perseus was really worth a damn as a hero. Iorgos the shepherd's clumsy son could've kicked ass with that kit.)
Him being a Hero, and priorities being priorities, after slaying Medusa the very next thing he does with all this divine provenance is to fly all the way to northwest Africa to show Medusa's head to a king who snubbed him once, thus turning him into the Atlas mountains. But if it weren't for his Heroic pettiness (and wanting to stick to the coast 'cause he was a little nervous about getting completely lost flying across the Strait of Sicily) he might not have come across Andromeda in her time of need.
Andromeda Chained, the IF story, begins with Cepheus serving up his daughter on the rocks.
Subverting a patriarchal damsel in distress story isn't hard. Centering her makes it inevitable. The hard part is still having something interesting to say beyond the obvious consequences of the recontextualization. Andromeda Chained is meant to be played several times, and it can be without it overstaying its welcome. It's a choice game about not having agency, yet finds a way to play to the medium's strengths. It's well-written and judicious and deft in its brevity and the paths it offers and the slight variations they create, effectively dramatizing the leeway Andromeda does have: how much to resent all this.
The penultimate paragraph of the story always ends "the tale of Perseus wends on" in concession to it always being his tale. The real chains were never the ones on the rock.
For Fallen London players it's a familiar setting but with a 2-D twist that's not just a gloss: the game builds to a clever conclusion dependent on both inspirations. If you like parser puzzlers and at least one of the two FLs, check it out.
Fun setting, quick moving, creative puzzles.
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