Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

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!

This game has a unique UI that has a sleekness to it, but is also rather disorienting. Other reviewers (at intfiction.org) have covered this aspect well already, but I'll echo that because of the way the UI and navigation is set up, it took me a bit to realize that you have to look at the truck from three different locations to get all the items you need to proceed with your mission.

While I spent a fair amount of time with the game, replaying more times than I can count, I never managed to get the “good” ending. Even once I (eventually) realized how to do it, I got too impatient (Spoiler - click to show)just sitting in the truck waiting and went to flip the pump switch to make the disposal go faster… and got eaten. I restarted, determined to try again… and that time (Spoiler - click to show)I got eaten just when I’d finished setting everything up. I didn’t have the motivation to do it all over again, so I gave up, only discovering far too late that you can save the game—all those times I replayed from the beginning when I could have been reloading a save!

I enjoyed the spooky vibe and all the different possibilities for what you can do/what can happen. Those aspects reminded me of last year’s A Thing of Wretchedness, although here you have a concrete goal and more of a sense of stakes, which was nice. The glimpses of the world that we get are intriguing, and I enjoyed seeing the descriptions of the environment change (Spoiler - click to show)once you become a mutant—honestly, I think the Mutant Jake endings were my favorites. I also like that (Spoiler - click to show)the duct tape can be used in (at least) two different, mutually exclusive ways (tape the hose to have no leaks, tape the pump switch for speed); I’m so used to items in adventure game puzzles being single-use, so having two different options here and having to choose your trade-off was a nice design feature.

This game is quite polished and has a smooth parser and a nice UI. I followed the advice from other players to look at the instructions for minigame #1 before attempting it, and was glad I did because I don’t think I would have figured that out on my own. However, I did get a bit tired of that puzzle by the fifth or so go-round. Part of the reason, I think, is that having 24 tries after getting the implant upgrade took away the sense of pressure and made me stop thinking very carefully about my guesses, whereas the two I solved with only 8 guesses had that sense of tension and needing to make every guess count.

My other main critique is the writing of the NPCs, of which there are six or seven. It’s immediately very clear that they only exist as pieces of the game’s puzzles; none of them interact with you until you approach them, and while some are introduced with a characterizing line like “A bureaucrat peers at the deck’s monitor with dead eyes,” others simply get “X is here.” Livening up those introductory descriptions (sure, Dr. Mohr is here, but what’s she doing?) and having them act more naturally—e.g., greeting you when you walk into their offices—would go a long way toward making them feel more like actual people and better integrating them into the game.

Overall though, if you're looking for a short, word- and grid-puzzley hacker game, you'll have fun with this one.

This was a polished and well-written game that unfortunately I didn’t really connect with. After finishing my first playthrough, per the game's explicit encouragement I restarted, expecting to see entirely new memories and paintings. But then five out of seven paintings and the same number of memories were repeats from my first playthrough. The memories were tied to different paintings, though, and it was disappointing to learn that the pairings hadn't been deliberately curated.

I also was never really emotionally engaged. The PC is clearly a specific character, rather than a blank-slate/self-insert; they have these specific memories of their relationship with the artist character, and they’ve made certain life choices like giving up painting to work at an ad agency. So I couldn’t pretend it was actually me going through this, but I also didn’t learn enough about the PC to really give me a sense of them as a person, which left me feeling emotionally distant from them and their remembrances of the artist. (It doesn’t help that the memories I got on my initial playthrough made that character come across as an asshole who I personally wouldn’t have kept putting up with.)

I also didn't vibe with the choice (Spoiler - click to show)to make the painting be automatically created for me at the end; it felt like the game was dictating what my emotional response to the memories should be. (Spoiler - click to show)I would have found it much more meaningful to get to decide for myself what subject, mood, etc. the painting should focus on—being able to interpret the memories for myself, using the choices of what to paint to reflect on what I took from them. Being allowed to adjust the painting afterward was nice but didn’t hit the same way doing it myself from the start would have.