Reviews by Jaded Pangolin

this is the kind of game i generally love, queer-positive fantasy with a customizable pc and a puzzle-y aspect that isn't too hard but feels satisfying. you play as a detective investigating a planned theft at an opera premiere in fantasy venice. you have a bit less than two days before the theft is supposed to happen, which keeps the size of the investigation small.

nonetheless, there are (what feels like) a lot of colorful characters to meet, with hand drawn portraits and everything. i can take or leave character portraits usually - ive liked some vns but it's also nice to be able to imagine characters the way i want to - but here i think the art is very nice and really creates a unique look/vibe for the game.

despite the time crunch, the vibe is pretty low-key and chill, and you have plenty of time to fully investigate all your leads. there's an rpg-ish stat system with dice, im not always that into randomness in an investigation type game but this seemed pretty forgiving, with multiple ways to get the same information based on different stats. im not very smart and did need a hint, but i solved the mystery and got 90 points!

i was excited by the romance genre tag but it was just a little bit and entirely at the end. it was cute but didn't feel integrated with the rest of the plot. i guess it would be hard to integrate it more with the timeline but idk i was kinda disappointed. that's why this is 4 stars instead of 5 but maybe that's unfair bc i think it could've been 5 if it didn't list the genre that way... mb ill change it later! but it just wasn't what i expected.

this is another ifcomp game that's a little outside my usual range. i tend to like games with high player agency, where i really feel like im creating my own version of the story (i would be such a choice of games girlie if those games didn't all cost money 🥲). but i love love love queer fantasy and games with romance elements, so i gave this a shot.

this game does have meaningful choices, but they're subtle and infrequent. the third person pov contributes to the feeling that you're not really controlling or being any character in this story; you are watching the story play out and occasionally you can give one of the characters a nudge in some direction.

but the writing is very strong, with compelling characters, and the romance was lovely, so i enjoyed the game a lot. i think many queer people can relate to the idea of sympathizing with what we're told by society is "monstrous", being drawn to a group of people treated as a dangerous other, wanting stuff that we're told will destroy the fabric of society if we allow ourselves to indulge in it, etc., and those experiences are reflected in the mc's interactions with demons as a class and with the love interest in particular (with the mc's academic advisor in the role of representing societal queerphobia).

i also appreciate the tasteful sensuality. explicit content is valid and i support it existing and being allowed on any and every platform, but i am personally not that into it, and this game was at a good level for me in that regard.

i don't play a lot of parser games but i was drawn to this game by the fun title and implications of a detailed fantasy setting, which is something i always love.

it turned out to be very friendly to someone like me. if you have to use a verb the game will pretty much tell you what it is. there are large sections that are basically cyoa except that you have to type "choose (whatever)" instead of clicking. so while i am a little scared of parser games, this felt not very parser game like and didn't intimidate me. there are four different sections with four different gameplay mechanics and they were all easy to pick up.

otherwise i admit i did not really vibe with this game. im all about worldbuilding and interesting characters really, and i guess this kind of thing was not the point. there were a lot of intriguing details of the world, but they were not explored in depth, and i had some trouble figuring out what kind of setting it was even supposed to be. it felt like high fantasy mostly, but sometimes the tech level seemed modern or even futuristic, like in the part where you have to crawl thru vents to get to a "hazmat room". this is a combo that can work but there just wasn't enough detail for me to figure out how it all fit together.

for characters, i liked the fateweaver (i think that was her name? the tower lady). you get a whole section where you do nothing but talk to her so you really get to know her unusual/inhuman(?) point of view and that was fascinating to me. but with the other three former heroes i didn't really feel like i knew who they were.

and then there's the ending. (Spoiler - click to show)where it turns out it's all for nothing and the world ends anyway. this is the philosophical part, i guess, and i don't know anything about philosophy. but when so many of my peers are like "why do anything, we'll all be dead soon", i don't really like to see this kind of message in fiction. i guess the games perspective is "you should try anyway but just be aware you're probably f*cked"? but i do think that people are not gonna try unless they really believe success is possible, so i don't think the nihilism (?) is helpful.

the "gotcha" of it feels especially weird bc at the beginning there's like a personality quiz that sorts you into one of four segments (though you do all four eventually), and one of the questions is about what you would do if you know the world is ending. and only one of the answers is "try to save it anyway", but regardless of what you say, that is what you spend the game doing. you don't actually have the option to accept your fate and focus on spending your remaining time with your loved ones or whatever. so even if you accept the nihilism you can't make the "good" nihilist choice, you have to act like you have hope anyway and then the game is like "lmao you thought..." maybe the real winning strat is to close the tab and go hang out with your friends before we all die to climate change or world war 3.

but also maybe i am badly misunderstanding everything because i am just a humble idiot. i don't know if i am even understanding nihilism right.

anyway on a more petty note i might mind this less if i hadn't grinded for a million years to beat the final boss. according to the walkthrough (which i looked at after i finished the game) i guess i didn't have to but my dumb a** could not get through that conversation 💀 so i thought the fight was mandatory and i loaded my save to grind until i could beat the boss which was very tedious. and then it was all pointless anyway.

the game seems like it has a lot of work and love put into it so probably it is me that is failing here. probably this would be a great game for someone who likes philosophy and wants to try a parser game that's easy to get into. but it is not really for a silly fantasy girlie like me, and im sorry for not getting it.

so i will say up front that i'm not a fan of ai art, and if i had realized that this game had a lot of it i might not have started playing. but i knew absolutely nothing about it when the itch.io algorithm served it up to me, and by the time i started seeing the really wonky, obviously ai-ish images, i was too hooked to quit. which is a testament to the creator's game design abilities, if nothing else.

the concept of the game is that you're doing genealogical research to place all the roottrees (a very on-the-nose name, but i'll forgive it) on a big old family tree. complicating this is the fact that it's the 90s, so search engines are in their early days and no one has a convenient insta profile for you to get details of their life from. on the other hand, most of the roottrees are at least kinda famous, so there is more info about them on the internet than there would have been for the rest of us plebs in that era. it's all a matter of closely reading whatever documents you currently have and figuring out which keywords will lead you deeper down the research rabbithole. this all works very smoothly. even though any fiddly-ness (is that a word? 😅) about exact keywords could have been excused as a matter of period accuracy, i don't remember any situations in which the game didn't recognize something i thought it should have.

plot-wise this is mostly just a "rich white people causing each other problems" kind of story, and not even in an over-the-top hbo succession way. honestly if it had been a book i don't think it would have held my interest. but the effort you have to put into following the trail of breadcrumbs to figure out who fell out with who, when, and over what made it really compelling. during the 48 hours between starting and finishing the game (i did it in two sittings on consecutive days - i want to say it's maybe like 6 hours of gameplay?), i was thinking about it all the time. and i did end up being fond of some of the characters, even if most of them are not very fleshed out.

(my favorite minor character is the one - caroline, i think? - who left her lousy husband to be a lesbian sculptor. goodforher.jpg)

as much as i enjoyed it, though, i have to say i don't think it was well served by the ai art. obviously i am biased, but i think it presents practical problems for the game beyond my personal tastes. one, the more individuals there are in an image, the more distractingly weird the anatomy becomes, and that really took me out of the experience. two (and probably more importantly), the fact that ai image generators can't make multiple consistent images of the same character is a HUGE issue for a game where identifying people in photos is a core mechanic.

you might say this doesn't really matter THAT much because you only need to identify one image of each character - everything else is bonus points. but with the large group images, in most cases, you're clearly supposed to be doing a process of elimination. like, "okay, there are five guys in this picture, and four of them are people i have solo photos of elsewhere, so the fifth must be the one guy from this generation/branch of the family that i haven't seen yet!" except that's hard to do when the four other guys look completely different from how their other photos are. i ended up just doing straight up trial and error for a lot of those, just trying tagging everyone of the right age/gender in a photo as the missing person until the game told me i got it right. this was frustrating, especially in a game that's mostly careful about not making you guess at random. (it wasn't trying to make you guess at random, of course, the limitations of the technology just turned out that way.)

anyway, i hear the creator is remaking this with human-made art and i'm sure that's going to be great! if you're interested in the game i might suggest waiting until that version is out. but if you're impatient or can't spend the money, this version is worth a look too.

in "more a haunting than a history," the pc returns to their tiny hometown after their aunt's death. what seems at first like a simple matter of dealing with her affairs while reconnecting with old friends, though, rapidly becomes more complicated, because it turns out that their high school years were straight out of a "teens vs monster of the week" cw show... only they don't remember any of it.

the game was definitely nostalgic for me as someone who watched a lot of that stuff at that age, and it's a little more realistic take on how hard it would be on a teenager to be constantly saving your town from evil, while not being totally miserable all the time or coming off line the writer thinks the genre is bad. like, there are some people who are like "it's bad when stories have kids saving the world because kids shouldn't have that responsibility," but this feels more aimed at adults who have moved on from that kind of story but remember it fondly.

the game is really well written and does a good job balancing the main plot and the dating sim aspects. tho i guess it helps that three of the dateable characters are deeply tied into the plot and the pc's history. imo all the relationships were compelling and believable, which isn't always easy to pull off. (poly and aroace options too! you love to see it!) i also thought the writing was good overall, and i loved the creepy dream sequences. (this is the second review in a row where i've mentioned creepy dream sequences... idk, i just really enjoy them for some reason! 😆)

there seems to be a lot of different endings depending on your choices, but not a lot of branching during the game itself. the endings are pretty substantial tho - several "pages"/screens each - which i appreciated!

i haven't played the original amnesia game. i'm new to parser if and a little intimidated by it, and based on the reviews saying how unforgiving it is, i don't think i'm ready for it. so i can't really compare the two, but i can say what i thought of this game by itself, so here goes.

in lethe, you wake up in a hotel room in new york with no idea who you are, and almost immediately things start to get weird. first your clothes are missing, then there's this woman who shows up saying she's your fiance, and another woman who says she's your wife, and then you find out you're maybe a wanted criminal... it's quite a day, that's for sure. it only gets crazier from there, but i don't want to spoil anything.

the game's writing was generally very good. (though i didn't always love it's writing of female characters, but it is from the 80s so that's maybe to be expected.) there are some very vivid descriptions especially in the dream sequences. the plot is fast paced and full of surprises, really keeping the player guessing. i really wanted to know the backstory and how things were gonna turn out, so it's a shame I wasn't able to complete a playthrough without the game breaking. but ill go into that more later.

if you mess up in this game you usually die, or go to jail and then eventually die. in the original it seems like that's just the end of that and you just have to reload. but i really liked what this version did, which is have you get stuck in limbo (or the greek underworld equivalent i guess). charon, acting as some kind of afterlife bouncer, won't let you in because your names not on his guest list (as far as either of you knows, because you don't know what your name is) and so he just punts you back in time to try again. the game remembers whatever you learned from doing the thing that killed you (so your options are slightly different), and if you go to jail you even get important hints about your backstory and why you have amnesia, so the death stuff doesn't feel like an annoyance or a total waste of time.

unfortunately there were other aspects of the adaptation that didn't work so well. there are some long linear sequences, especially early on, where you're just clicking one link to advance over and over again (like the department store dream sequence, which otherwise was really creepy and cool), and sometimes you get two options of links to click but they're not really very different. the game does open up eventually, but the clicking through linear sections gets a little boring, especially if you have to restart multiple times due to bugs. the game also attempts to preserve an inventory and a money system, but as far as i can tell there's no way to see what you're carrying or how much money you have.

so anyway. the bugs. on my first playthrough, after one of the times i died and got kicked back in time, the game just kind of cut off mid paragraph, like it seemed like it should be possible to scroll down more but it wasn't. i tried loading my save but it didn't work. reloading the page didn't help. the only thing i could do was restart. this was very annoying, but i was invested in the game so i tried again. the second time, i had a no-brain moment and tried to leave the hotel before watching the news in the lobby, at which point the desk clerk made me open my safe deposit box. then i went and watched the tv and then... the clerk made me open my safe deposit box again? then the game dead-ended again and sure enough, i couldn't load my save. the other review on this page says this only happened to the reviewer when they were playing experimentally and most players would probably never run into the bug, but that was super not true for me. i guess you could say it was "experimental" of me to do stuff in the wrong order at the hotel but actually i'm just dumb 😭

anyway, in general the game seems to get weird if you do stuff in the wrong order, even though there's mostly not really any indication of the right order to do stuff in. i ran into bette before i made enough money to rent a computer, so it said I left the disk at her apartment, but then i still had it when i went back to the computer place. i'm glad i did because probably i couldn't have advanced in the game otherwise, but it was still weird.

basically i did really want to play this game but i don't think the game really wanted me to play it. ill probably try again eventually but for now i'm too frustrated. i hope the bugs get fixed.