Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

A goofy, frenetic lampoon of slasher-horror. Take the genre-consciousness of Scream, turn up the wackiness to 11, and put it in the hands of someone whose basic attitude to the genre is one of amused contempt, and you basically have Samhain.

Samhain's comedy is a scattered, hyperactive mess of one-shot gags, fourth-wall breaking, and 90s pop culture references, sprinkled with the occasional hot-take social satire. The author's voice is very prominent, to the point where it feels like a particularly self-indulgent stand-up set. Occasionally a joke works, but on the other hand, occasionally a Hot Take breaks through the light-hearted goofiness and just feels gross.

The basic premise is that you're a pumpkin-headed scarecrow brought to life, and now you're running around a high school killing cheerleaders. The game's structure is very linear, and it does a decent job of cluing in the next thing you're meant to do.

An old-school cave-crawl; part of an unfortunate trend, predominantly in the UK, of games which offered a prize to the first player to complete them, as documented by Jimmy Maher:

To make a puzzle that will be attempted by thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people and not have it solved within hours — a development that would be commercially disastrous — requires making that puzzle outrageously hard. And outrageously hard puzzles just aren’t much fun for most people. It’s this simple truth that makes the idea of a mass treasure hunt much more alluring than the reality. The differences between the demands of the contest and the demands of good puzzle design are almost irreconcilable.

'Outrageously hard' is a qualitatively different from 'very hard', here. The approach all but mandated games which weren't just difficult, but cruelly unfair. In order to win Ket, you must use a password which only appears, randomly, for no diegetic reason, in a particular room of the early game; that room has become inaccessible by the time you need to use the word, rendering the game unwinnable without the player ever knowing why. There are a number of tightly timed sequences which will kill you if you do anything wrong, and a lot of random combat which will usually kill you even if you make optimal choices. The mid-game features a brutal inventory-management puzzle. Even with a walkthrough this is a painfully difficult game to play.

Ket has modest narrative ambitions: it's a minimally-written D&D-style melange with a nondescript hero who has no very strong motivation other than getting from point A to point B. A small distinctive feature is that the narrator is meant to be a companion of the player-character - so 'we' gets used a lot, and occasionally the companion passes comment - but this is rendered in an unclear and often confusing way, and it's never really built into anything more than a gimmick.

Mildly interesting as a piece of archaeology; not recommended otherwise.