Ratings and Reviews by Coral Nulla

you shouldn't read this review, though. you should just click play above. it doesn't take very long to play she lied.

much has been written about the nature of games or all art really as indirect conversation between souls. there is perhaps no greater work to explore this concept than try to find your way out of my wizard maze, a game which feels a lot like a video game adaptation of the experience of showing up for a party at someone's house and discovering you're the only person there, so you and the host just chill out on the sofa and talk and look at stuff. in this case, however, the host is fully in charge of what you are talking about and looking at and your input in the conversation is limited to a small number of possible responses to each encounter, generally expressing varying levels of dismay or delight at whatever you've been presented with this time. one later passage suggests this game may have been written for one specific person, so I guess I really am the gatecrasher. (i later learn this originates from a popular tumblr blog starring these very wizards. mixed feelings about the patreon plug as a narrative element but get that bag wizards i guess.)

is it a video game? the game soon admits that uquiz does not support branches and your choices are doing nothing but adding to a series of unseen backend totals. still, you are frequently presented with possible actions - attempt to go through the hedge? get trapped in a psychic prison? - and sometimes you do get to maintain state by picking options that match with your previous choices. so it's more like a simulation of a video game, or rather the player is doing part of the work of executing the game. maybe this is closer to a ttrpg? you are roleplaying for sure (or detachedly rolling your eyes at the possibility of play) since you can only really play the game if you imagine you are really trapped in the wizard maze and construct the rest of the game in your mind. I didn't get stuck in the psychic prison, but the analogy is there. why would I have persisted in playing this over two weeks if some aspect of my mind (and my computer) hadn't been occupied all that time by the wizard maze? I chose to play in this world, but it is not my world, and I could not escape until the gamesmaster allowed me.

yes, it really took me two weeks to find my way out of the wizard maze. because there really are 126 questions in this game. which is a lot. I played through in chunks and every time I left off it seemed there was so much more ahead of me. I never thought I could be so immersed in a uquiz, especially when after two weeks the loud noise warning finally paid off and I reached the part of the maze where the host just started showing me youtube videos. here I felt we were really hanging out. you know, it's easy to send someone a list of funny things to watch. but it feels different when you put them ninety questions deep in the wizard maze. I don't know, I thought that was interesting.

all in all, I do not know who put this on IFDB or why, but I am glad they did, and I am glad I entered the wizard maze.

also I wrote this review partway through the maze and then got hit with a ten-hour countdown. which was entirely optional, to be clear, but I felt this was some kind of divine retribution so I left it open on my computer until it ended. (Spoiler - click to show)also even after completing the game I am still trapped within the wizard maze i guess this was the only way it was going to end but still for the love of the goddess HELP ME

A few weeks ago I visited a (comparatively) small theme park with a party of around twenty from my local trans youth group and—being a queer twentysomething with short dark hair and sunglasses—had a suitably surreal old time, complete with souvenir flattened penny (albeit in pence rather than cents). This provided an interesting backdrop of memory to this game. Theme parks are weird: the ultimate escape, we're told, yet they only seem to provoke more drama than ever.

So this is a choice-based horror game with a similar feel to the film The Zone of Interest. I admit I found it a little confusing to follow who I was following and whose decisions I was making—a changing name in the header and a dramatis personae in the footer could have gone a long way—but then that's not exactly detrimental to the overwhelming experience of a theme park. It's not like I remember everybody in my family in real life! (I wondered if there was a version of this where you would actually choose a character to play as, and you'd gradually experience the whole story through small crossover moments and repeated playthroughs. But that seems like a lot, and it's already a lot.)

I liked the occasional splash of art which isolates a little fragment of experience and I liked the sarcastic misery of the link prompts. I liked playing a radio show for no-one. I liked little moments like visiting the diner and finding relief in it being largely unthemed, a little fragment of the normal world whose familiarity is unexpectedly pleasing. Because this is what theme parks are like really, they are alien worlds where you must explore and discover the way things are done here... Some have more experience than others (as I found on my trip, where I stuck with a friend who had been many times before and knew which rides to head to first before the queues got too long) while some are wide-eyed lost little lambs like me and then there are children like I was who are inevitably upset with varying levels of clue what's happening. I hope I never reach the first category; it seems more boring that way, so I'd rather play vicariously. The monster is always implied in the background—what exactly are we escaping from?—because this somewhere is a place where context is necessarily abandoned at the opening gates (there is no story in riding a rollercoaster, only pure experience, though I certainly felt different afterwards), where age matters less than height, where the world may as well have ended and this is the museum that commemorates it all and you get a free voucher for the gift shop on your way in. Instead, *OVER* makes its focus observational: peoplewatching is the stated intent at the outset, and it's chock full of details that are simultaneously loving and filled with quiet despair.

Make the most of it, because these days will be remembered forever. I think this game really does succeed at feeling like a memorial to (one particular corner of) the human race. It's a liminal space, all the cracks in between one memory and the next for hours on end when all you really want to do is lie down. It's the experience of dissociation sitting out there in the sun on thousands of acres of land. It's arrested development. These are our lives, I guess, in purgatory: a little break before we return to our fates. It's over now.

Oh, wait, no, that was the end of day one.

Uninteractive Fiction 2 complicates the legacy of its predecessor, once again ironically subverting the title by introducing new levels of interactivity. Taken as a unit, both entries in the series now form an additional choice which the player must consider: to lose, win, or not to play? Each option reveals something about the person who selects it. I myself take all three, laughing in the face of entropy. Who will you be?

EDIT: It seems there are more choices to make. This is the true inverse of the original: where before there was nothing, now there is something. I expect next time to find everything. But this is not next time. This is this time. I thought I was above it all, in the realm of creator rather than mere buttonpresser. But the truth—the whole and only truth—is that I have lost.