Reviews by Tabitha

This is a short game with a lot of depth, and one of my favorites in the 2024 Short Games Showcase. It starts with a classic “protagonist wakes up with amnesia” conceit, but not as an excuse for having a second-person AFGNCAAP protagonist; this MC is a specific character, a knight named Lazarrien, and his story is told in third-person past tense. We don’t play as him, but we share his disorientation as both he and we work to piece together his backstory and what’s happened to wreck the land around him.

The latter is depicted with vivid imagery—a field of burning roses, hills made of wax; evocatively described devastation. And through a series of encounters with NPCs, our hero gains a sense of purpose: to break the curse that’s caused all this. We follow Lazarrien as he makes his way toward the mountain peak where the solution apparently lies, with a demon in slow but steady pursuit. As he draws closer to his goal, the straightforward narrative he’s been given is slowly called into question. The story starts with uncertainty, then provides clarity, only to make us and Lazarrien question it.

This game was written for the Single-Choice jam, the conceit of which is that there can only be one point in the story where the player is given a choice between multiple options. Lazarrien builds to that choice and gives it momentous-feeling weight, letting the player decide whether Lazarrien will continue to doggedly pursue his mission at all costs, or whether a new desire has supplanted that. (Spoiler - click to show)However, the game then quickly subverts the importance of that choice, revealing that both options ultimately lead to the same result—which doesn't at all undercut the choice’s emotional impact.

The ending finally reveals the full truth of what’s going on, but even beyond that there’s one more layer to the game that I didn’t discover until I replayed it to write this review. Which path you’ll take through the story is randomized every time you start a new playthrough; it’s possible for you to encounter each of four NPCs in any order. And this is cool not only because it means you’ll see a slightly different story on a replay, but also because it’s diegetic: the story’s ending reveals that Lazarrien is undergoing a trial, for which he’s allowed endless attempts (although his memory is wiped at the beginning of each), and the only thing that might change each time is the order of the encounters.

In a different game, this could be a setup for players to try again and eventually succeed—but here, it’s made very clear that Lazarrien will never pass the trial. Players can repeat the game over and over, seeing the different iterations of the encounters, but no matter what choice you make at that single choice point, there’s only ever one ending—he fails. And this feels fitting; I’ve avoided stating the one big spoiler, but I will note that the subtitle is “A Love Story”. Lazarrien is repeating this endless, doomed cycle for love—what could be more romantic than that? (Here I will break my big-spoiler avoidance to add: (Spoiler - click to show)Especially when, in addition to being an outright queer story with the m/m romance, there are queer resonances to the “forbidden love” aspect, such as Lazarrien’s father decrying him as a sinner for loving a demon.)

The fatalistic ending does clash a bit with the fact that the game rewards replays; I’m typically a big replayer, but after my first playthrough of Lazarrien, having made my preferred choice and then seeing that it didn’t ultimately matter, I didn’t feel a need to play again. But after I replayed the other day and discovered the trick, I found it a cool design choice as a way to maintain the linearity but still give the player a fresh experience. I just think there needs to be a little more of an incentive to replay (maybe instead of the ending going back to the title screen, the game starts again automatically?).

All in all, I found it an excellent work of IF. As a bonus to everything I discussed above, it’s also presented stylishly, with a nice layout of the text and good use of color (I would just up the contrast of the brownish text a bit). I very much look forward to future work by DemonApologist!

This is a story I can't imagine being told as effectively in any other medium. The combination of short bits of text with "click to continue" interactivity, letting the reader take each new piece of information in at their own pace, and the lo-fi Decker illustrations and text effects all work so well together. The childhood loneliness, the gendered expectations, the horror of having a womb when the idea of pregnancy repulses you--it's all here in this tiny package, presented matter-of-factly but with so much underlying emotion. An engaging and impressive work.

This is a lovely little game that's been expanded from the original, shorter version. In it you wander around a surreal, magical greenhouse, peacefully exploring its hidden corners, choosing how to interact with what's around you and where to go next. I love games with a sense of exploration, and this one provides that in such a relaxing, lowkey way. Descriptions are short but vivid, and I replayed multiple times in order to see all the greenhouse has to offer.

This game confused me on multiple levels. I'm not sure if this version is just a demo of the full game? The itch page promises "various moral choices that will affect the story's progression and the ending" and "several chapters with different paths based on the player's choices", but in actuality the whole game took only 5 minutes to play through, and there was only a single choice at the very end leading to one of two endings. The father character seems to be set up as a sort of villain (he's the "heartless smoker") of the title, but in what we see, he hasn't actually done anything wrong (besides being a smoker, I guess?). The scenario he's in is rather melodramatic, and I wasn't emotionally engaged with the story. I also don't think that's how heart transplants work. 😅

This game was made for an "intentionally bad" visual novel jam. From what I've seen, events like that don't necessarily result in actually bad games, but rather encourage skilled authors to create a work with a looseness and silliness that can be quite fun. That was definitely the case here, with a don't-think-too-hard-about-it premise and some over-the-top characters resulting in funny exchanges as these angels and demons realize... maybe they aren't so different after all? I replayed to see every path and was entertained every time.

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one was intriguing from the get-go—we start in media res with our narrator, Monica, inhabiting someone else’s body, saying that she’s temporarily borrowed it, which immediately raised so many questions. What happened to Monica’s own body? Why did she need/want this? How did she come to this agreement with the body’s owner?

These questions are all answered eventually, but having my curiosity satisfied quickly paled in importance next to the emotional arcs of the two main characters. In that first scene, the “agreement” Monica has with her host quickly falls apart as she wants more time, time that the host does not want to give—and the host is the one with the power, able to wrest control and push her out. We then shift POVs to a woman named Lisa, who after blacking out at her desk for three days finds herself with two heartbeats and a left hand that’s taken on a mind of its own. Lisa is entirely incurious about this phenomenon, though, either simply ignoring it or rationalizing it away.

We switch between the two, Monica in the past in her borrowed body, Lisa in the present, losing control of hers. There’s plenty of horror simply in this, in your body not being fully your own, not being fully under your control, reminiscent of some real-life disabilities. But the horror is doubled here because this isn’t just a single person losing control. If you haven’t played the game and it isn’t clear already, Monica’s borrowed body and Lisa’s misbehaving body are one and the same, and in the present-day scenes they’re fighting for control, fighting for who gets to claim not just the body but the life that goes with it.

We learn why this is happening in one of the past, Monica-POV scenes, when the concept of changelings is introduced. In this story, a changeling is a detached soul who inhabits someone else’s body and slowly takes over. In one of her brief period’s at the body’s helm, Monica learns about this phenomenon and comes to the horrifying realization that she is in fact a changeling.

Instinctively wanting to take sides in the conflict, I found myself rooting for Lisa—it’s her body, after all; Monica is an invader! But Monica still remained a deeply sympathetic character. We see her meet and bond with a woman named Vivienne in the brief space of existence she has, and we see her longing for more time to be allowed to live. And when she has her terrible revelation, it’s clear she genuinely didn’t know what was going on; she wasn’t actively trying to take over someone else’s life. And once she knows that her continued existence would come at Lisa’s expense, she makes the choice to let go, letting herself fade away.

But. In the present, Lisa-POV scenes, Monica has returned after being dormant for seven years and is desperately trying to take back control. And it’s because she wasn’t the changeling after all; it was her body all along, and Lisa is the invader. She so successfully took control that Monica forgot it was her body to begin with.

When Monica finds out what she thinks is the truth, that she is the changeling, she wishes she hadn’t: “Not knowing is always the best option. No questions mean no answers that you don’t want to hear. The only way to avoid consequences is to do nothing - to be nothing. You can always forget. Let it dissolve. Let it fade away.” This is exactly what Lisa has done—she doesn’t think about the truth, won’t admit it to herself, pretends it isn’t real. Living in denial as the only way to live with herself.

By this point, my sympathies had fully flipped—I wanted Monica to get her body back and have the life she’d been denied for so long. The player gets to choose at the end who wins, and it was gratifying to be able to give that to Monica, and see an epilogue scene showing her getting to share a life with Vivienne. An incredibly compelling story.

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one bills itself as “A short story about the day before Halloween”, and that is exactly what it is, but with layers to it—over the course of the story we see four different days before Halloween over nine years in the life of the main character, starting in 2024 and traveling backwards, the protagonist de-aging as the story goes on. The descriptions are evocative and lovely, and the first-person prose has a slow quietness to it, asking to be savored. We see scenes and moments, but the connecting tissue is left for the reader to fill in, which I found very effective as I slowly put together an understanding of both what happened in between the vignettes and the significance of the cottonwood tree under which the story begins.

“I like this tree quite a bit,” the protagonist says in the first scene. “I remember coming here last year and thinking the same thing. The curl of its branches and the smoothness of its bark. That’s why I like it.” But the story builds to a moment, nine years before, that completely recontextualizes this claim. On that day, dressed in a princess costume, the protagonist travels with her parents to a corn maze where she anticipates finding “my kingdom, my castle, my home.” And in her child’s imagination, that’s exactly what happens, traveling through the maze and reaching the castle, then ultimately, “Finding a nice spot at the edge of the kingdom. A tree that could pierce the clouds. A funny kind of curl to its branches as it waves hello. Sitting against it, its smooth bark holding me upright. My throne.”

This scene is the first time we’ve seen the protagonist’s mother; something happened to her after this, and all the days-before-Halloween in the future are colored by this memory, of magic and wonder and the mother’s presence, contrasted with the loss of it all. On that longest-ago day, the protagonist relates, “Mom told me that today I’d become a princess. […] Looking out from the highest perch of the balcony at the furthest points of the kingdom, as far as the eye can see, the world with me at its center.” But this scene ends with the line, “I was a princess again the next day, but not for much longer after that.” With the loss of her mother, the idea that she is at the center of the world and nothing can go wrong for her is shattered.

In the scenes that take place over the intervening years, the day before Halloween is cold, costumes disappoint, the protagonist’s father is disengaged, and an incident at school taints even dressing up as a princess. Finally, in the present, we see the protagonist refusing to acknowledge the meaning the cottonwood tree has for her. When she takes a photo of it, she derides herself as “Too sentimental for my own good”. Her holding back from describing the emotions she feels about her mother’s death/absence leaves readers to fill them in, which is exactly what I did, feeling for myself everything the protagonist isn’t saying, and I found that very powerful. After getting to the end of the story the first time, I immediately replayed in order to experience it again through the lens of my new understanding, and by the time I reached the ending the second time I was tearing up. A beautiful, melancholy, understated piece.

I playtested this game and have replayed the published version. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but here are my thoughts otherwise!

First, the game is just plain fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments, and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. (Spoiler - click to show)The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. (Spoiler - click to show)Soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.

The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.

Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!

Another comp game that I'm a bit torn about, although the parts I liked made it one of my favorites this year. As a sucker for historical settings, I loved exploring the lighthouses and pubs of mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore and meeting people dressed in gibuses and gabardine (well, I actually encountered both of those items while they were not being worn, but you get the point). I loved the way the plot unfolded as I collected clues and pieced together what had happened to Poe and what was going on with the mysterious characters around him. When I did some Wikipedia-ing after finishing, I was impressed by how well the game was written around the actual circumstances of Poe’s death!

On the other hand, the present-day sections were significantly less engaging to me. That layer’s PC was so minimally fleshed out that I wasn’t really invested in him as a character (I don’t think gender is ever specified, actually, but I definitely imagined this PC as a man); we don’t get any backstory to reveal why he was willing to go to such lengths to achieve his goal of being known for writing without having actually written anything. And as a writer myself, that goal was impossible for me to relate to!

I quite enjoyed this game; highlights were the progression of newcomer knowing no one to being part of the community, the coziness of the setting, the several main NPCs’ stories, and the casual queerness. I did neglect my meal-planning a bit at first in favor of the social aspects, as I'm not much of a cook or foodie, but I hit 4 stars on a meal eventually!

Lowlights: I found the sheer number of recipes I could make by the end (having bought all the cookbooks) a bit overwhelming, and largely ignored some categories (sorry, salad- and sauce-lovers!). I also was a little confused on the theming, as I tried to do a regionally-themed meal but didn’t receive a bonus for it. My only other real friction point was that I didn’t learn how to get berries until over halfway through, and since my third noticeboard request was for a berry pie, I was stuck sitting on that one for a while. But these are minor complaints about what was overall a charming, pleasant, and well-made game!