Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

Violent Delight begins with you ordering an old video game cartridge… and then waiting. For one hour, in real-time. This mechanic has been talked about a lot; mostly, people seem to be frustrated by it. But I think it’s definitely got a purpose in the game. For one thing, the player and PC are aligned in the wait, and it’s for lack of anything better to do that you’ll try to check out the “Iffy Camp” games on your simulated computer… only to receive the message, “Sorry, art can no longer be experienced in your country as a measure to protect the children.” We’ll come back to this. Besides that, I saw it as a commentary on our instant gratification culture. Imagine ordering something from eBay and having it arrive within one hour. We already have next-day shipping (and I think same-day shipping is a thing with some companies?), but this is next-level: the PC can purchase something and have a mere hour wait… and yet players are still going to be impatient, wanting it to come even faster. This is underscored by the option to “demand efficiency” from the already very efficient shipping company.

After the one-hour wait, the cartridge arrives and the meat of the game starts. Other reviews have described this part, so I won’t repeat it, but as we go down the layers of “The Playground”, we see the child characters from the first level get older, and as they do things basically get worse and worse for them. There’s a hell, but that’s an early level; just wait till you get to the office. At the end, the boundaries of the world of The Playground and the PC’s real life blur and merge. Because everything that’s happening in the game is just… life. School is cruel, hospitals are cruel, workplaces are cruel… the world is a shitty place, systems are evil, and we’re stuck inside them, getting beaten down and ground up.

Remember those geoblocked IFComp, I mean Iffy Camp, games? They’re blocked to protect the children, because god forbid children be exposed to violence… Except real life is violence, and that irony of hand-wringing fears about “the children” while the same governments let said children grow up in poverty and be dehumanized by capitalism and stripped of the things that give them joy is captured so perfectly by Violent Delight.

I’ve now played all three games entered in IFComp 2025 by Lamp Post Projects (LPP; this review is going to get fairly acronym-heavy!), and have, inevitably, been comparing them. My favorite is Fantasy Opera (FO); one reason for that is its specific details, making it very grounded in its 17th-century-Italy-inspired opera house setting. The other two LPP games, while drawing on specific historical inspirations (which are detailed in the “behind the game” documents that each links to at the end), had much more generic-feeling fantasy settings. Another thing I preferred in FO is that the PC was a bit less of a blank slate; they have a defined profession (detective), and depending on the stats you pick, they may have knowledge of different areas of the world/society.

In The Path of Totality (PT), the other LPP IFComp game which this review is not actually about, you get to pick at the beginning what it is that’s drawn you to go on the central pilgrimage, which allowed me to characterize the PC a bit. In The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens (SSG), though, you are pretty much the blankest of blank slates. In both SGG and PT, a big part of the focus is on forming relationships with the NPCs—but in both, the way to form those relationships is basically just to always pick the nice/pleasant dialogue option, as opposed to the more neutral or cold/rude ones. As such, the relationship building in SSG didn’t feel authentic to me; I wasn’t developing relationships with these people, but just avoiding being a jerk, and that alone was enough for them to become attached to me. I would have liked opportunities to actively characterize the PC more. For example, what if there were multiple nice/supportive options, but in different tones, like earnest/sincere, commiserating, and lighthearted?

I liked the setup of SSG, with the PC’s mysterious draw to the titular gardens, getting pulled into an old mystery and the current woes of the staff. But again, I preferred FO’s investigation mechanics—rolling dice for knowledge or dexterity checks, interviewing people; in SSG it often just felt like “make sure you click every option.” And the puzzles felt too easy: the (Spoiler - click to show)naiad’s name was so strongly signposted it didn’t really feel like a puzzle; the (Spoiler - click to show)tooth one was easily solved by lawnmowering (although I did like the line-drawing one; it was satisfying to get it right on my first guess!). I also missed the sense of time pressure from FO; the pacing of SSG felt almost too leisurely, where there was a sense of (or sometimes it was literal) just waiting around until circumstances were right for the next story beat. The journal segments also slowed the pacing; I’d prefer if they were available to view anytime from the menu, so I could refresh my memory on prior events (as I played over several days), instead of being inserted into the story.

Going back to the actual plot: you discover that (Spoiler - click to show)three staff members at Sylvan Gardens have magical ailments (one of which is an “everyone you love will suffer a terrible fate” curse) and that the long-deceased founder of the estate, Pecunia, hid her store of magical plant seeds behind various puzzley gating mechanisms. The fourth NPC, ostensibly the gardens’ hermit, later reveals himself as a centuries-old dryad who’s the only surviving member of his species as far as he knows, after Pecunia destroyed his forest to build her home, inadvertently wiping out all the other resident dryads. So there’s a lot of pain and trauma in these characters’ backstories, more than I had expected given the gentle tone and vibes of the game, and the way these past tragedies were incorporated didn’t quite work for me. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)Felix the gardener discovered his curse when his wife died tragically, but I don’t recall ever getting to ask him about her; she’s just a sad fact to add pathos to his plight. I wanted the game to sit with the tragedies imposed on its characters a bit more, rather than just using them as motivation for the player/PC.

This is a fairly critical review, but I think LPP is a skilled author who’s clearly put a lot of work into all three of these games and is doing cool things with Ink (replacing the continuous-scroll text pane with a single page + history view; adding a nice menu system with multiple save slots; incorporating lovely watercolor art and original music). I did enjoy my time with SSG, and I look forward to seeing what LPP does in the future!

Originally posted at intfiction.org on September 25, 2025

This is a visual novel that drops you straight into the life of the PC with little to help orient you. In short order you meet a virtual boss and a character that seems to be an AI that lives in the PC’s head, and learn that the PC is happy with her low-level waste management job and has no interest in climbing the ranks (which, it’s later revealed, does seem like it comes with more risks than rewards).

What is “waste management” in this sci-fi world? It seems to be collecting detritus from various planets, cataloging it, and then destroying it. But it was never clear to me why this is being done. Why is this corporation “managing waste” on a bunch of long-abandoned planets? In a way the finds are treated as archaeological objects, with the cataloguing component of the process, but the motivation behind documenting rather than just destroying is never elaborated. Also, when the gameplay shifts to you going on these search-and-collect missions, you’re only allowed to take one object from each, which seems entirely counter to the idea of waste management, and is likewise never explained.

The heart of the story, though, is the PC’s relationships—with Maria, the AI she (from what I gathered) designed and had implanted in her own brain, and with the two mission companions you get to choose between. I replayed to experience both paths, one with the company golden child turned defector turned reeducated drone (or so the PC initially believes) Zinnia, and the other with the volatile former racer, now condemned criminal Raven. In my playthroughs, at least, the PC develops an attachment to whichever one you choose, which happens largely without player input; the main player choices are of which piece of junk you salvage on each trip, and from peeking at the walkthrough, these are what determine which ending you’ll get.

On the Raven path, my choices led to (Spoiler - click to show)me forming an attachment to him, ripping the AI mechanism out of my head, and preparing for the two of us to flee together… only for me to ultimately betray him to the company, turning him in and ending the story with my AI back in place. I’m not sure what it was about my choices of objects that led to this dramatic series of events. The Zinnia path, in contrast, was much more subdued—the PC’s opinion of her slowly changed, and (Spoiler - click to show)the two ended by professing love for each other. This path also had more tension with Maria; her presence seemed like more of a burden to the PC in this route, with regular interludes emphasizing that.

While the sprites are original art, the backgrounds are photographs of real places (mostly buildings), some with real people in them, which made them a hard sell for portraying abandoned sci-fi planets. Maybe this was on purpose, the game using its sci-fi trappings to comment on real life, but if that is the case, the parallels it’s drawing definitely went over my head.

So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but my main feeling coming away was one of confusion. The company the PC works for seems to be powerful and evil, but I was never sure what they were actually doing aside from sending employees on these waste management missions. What do higher-ranking employees do? What does it mean to be a “defector” in this world?

I’m not sure if this is the kind of VN where getting all the endings will unlock a “true” ending that sheds new light on everything that’s gone before; I only played each path once, but the walkthrough reveals they both have a variety of possible endings. Having spent an hour and a half with the game already, though, I wasn’t particularly motivated to replay several more times in order to collect all the endings. I may dip back in at least once, though, to at least see just how different the outcomes of each path can be.