Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

I liked the “mundane horror” vibe of this game, with the eponymous wretched thing wandering around the PC’s house but not posing any active threat. The gameplay, then, is mostly exploring the house and piecing together what might have happened to get you to this point. Of course, you can also--as the game strongly suggests you should--poison the wretched thing and see how that plays out, and in fact that is necessary in order to get the ending that reveals the most information. Unfortunately, this additional backstory still doesn’t shed much light on the situation, and in fact introduces a new mystery that is left unsolved. On the whole, I think the mood is the game's most successful aspect, while the story and pacing don't quite hold up.

I was looking forward to this one, and it did not disappoint! I knew it included (Spoiler - click to show)a clever use of the “undo” command, so I thought that aspect wouldn’t be a surprise when it arrived—but it actually still was, and it was delightful. (Spoiler - click to show)I love time shenanigans in games, so I found it very fun to rewind to the beginning and play out a different version of events.

Given the Single-Choice-Jam origins, the game is rather on rails, guiding you the whole time to the single correct command for that turn (as such, it isn’t possible to die or otherwise hit a game-over). You won’t get much out of examining things (typically the description from the main text is just repeated) or trying to explore; rather, it presents a kind of “guess the verb” puzzle of figuring out which of the custom commands is needed at which time. I found this aspect fun, and one of the game’s charms; while it took me a bit to hit on the idea of (Spoiler - click to show)looting the wine bottle in order to drink the wine, it was very satisfying when I did make that connection. I also liked having to (Spoiler - click to show)smite corpses, plural, in order to win that battle; the game really does reward thinking like a barbarian! So I think adjusting your expectations is key to enjoying this game—don’t look for typical parser conventions, but instead appreciate the clever new things this game does with the format.

I didn't finish this one, as after playing for a bit it became clear that it just wasn’t for me. The super-limited parser (e.g., type “i” to “investigrab”, which provides more detail on and/or takes anything that’s important in the current room) removed the aspect of parser games I most enjoy, which is the sense of agency and exploration. Here, I knew there were no secrets to uncover by closely examining my surroundings; it was just a rote matter of hunting down gems to increase my powers to hunt more gems. It’s definitely a well-done game, just very much not my style!

(Review largely hidden because most of my thoughts contain spoilers.)

(Spoiler - click to show)My main thought coming away from this one is… this game was deeply sad. Eddie (i.e., child Ed)'s pain comes through so clearly in the game he created, with the idyllic lake serving as a security blanket, so precious that it even comes up in his imagined futures of winning the lottery and being president of the moon. Otherwise, his life is steeped in bleakness: the bullying, the sister dying/dead of leukemia, the bad/absent father, the best-friend-of-convenience… There are moments of joy, like the lake and the cat, and overall the game doesn’t feel too bleak because it’s so mitigated by the childish excitement—you can feel how happy this kid is to have created a game, how clever he feels, and it’s very cute. But now, as adult Ed looking back on it, it mostly just brings him pain.

The ending felt like a gut punch. Ed’s daughter, named Erica after his sister, comes into the room needing to use the computer. She’s kind of rude and dismissive, preoccupied with school, stressed by the shift to online learning due to the COVID lockdown. So her attitude is understandable; she has no idea what her dad’s just been through (and in fact it seems likely that she has little or no knowledge of this part of his past at all). But oof, did it feel like a knife twist.

This game reminded me of the type of literary fiction that essentially reads as a portrait of a deeply unhappy person. I’ve never liked this kind of story because it leaves me wondering what the point is. Here, Ed basically asks that question for us at the end. “Does ancient history matter?” He says he doesn’t think so, but isn’t 100% committed to that answer. And I mean… my thought is, of course it matters. It matters because those events made Ed who he is today, just as ancient Rome played a part in shaping the way our world is today. Even if Ed doesn’t want it to, how can it not matter?

But then, maybe the reason he’s asking is because he does want it to. Maybe he wants to know that this experience of reliving his traumatic past wasn’t pointless after all.

On the whole: too sad for my taste. But definitely a well done game.

This was fun! I completed it without using the walkthrough or any hints, which always makes me feel accomplished; the puzzles weren’t too easy, either, but were lightly challenging in an enjoyable way (and there was one I found especially clever). The circus setting was well-detailed; I especially liked the variety of useful props I acquired. The writing was funny (“The Ringmaster began his career as a tightrope walker, and to this day he’s still high-strung”), the NPCs were all distinctive, and I’ll always love an anti-greedy-developer plotline. I also really appreciated the casual queerness, e.g.:

You’ve watched her pull off many incredible feats over the years, among them pulling a rabbit out of a hat, sawing herself in half, transitioning her gender, and pulling a rabbit out of a different hat.

I do think it would have been a stronger game with a bit more polish. Some examples:

-Unimplemented nouns providing the classic “You see no [thing mentioned in room description] here.”
-Conversation options for each of the NPCs still showing up long after they don’t make sense anymore.
-While I liked each of the three acts being its own self-contained puzzle, being able to repeat them (endlessly?) after failing felt like it broke the narrative a bit, especially since you couldn’t discuss your failure with the involved performer at all.
-A portion of the end game sequence seemingly not having anything for the player to do besides wait.

I think a post-comp release could easily take care of these things, though, and make for a truly solid game.

So, this game's blurb is rather misleading. The PC’s partner never appears in the story; by the time we’ve gone through picking up flowers, walking through the park, and reaching home, the partner has already left, and this doesn’t change in the subsequent loops. This isn’t a game about trying to prevent the inevitable, then; it’s about trying to process it.

Unlike a typical time-loop story, details of the day are different every time, from the weather to what’s happening at the dog park, and these shifts help build momentum as the PC progresses linearly through each loop, always carrying out the same string of actions. Choices are present, but fairly few, and I don’t think they really matter (although on second thought, I wonder if some of those toward the end actually do…). I didn’t mind this, as it still felt like an experience I could only get through interactive fiction. The repetition with minor changes created an interesting atmosphere—rather than fighting against the constraints of a static world, the PC has to journey through one that reflects their own shifting emotional state back at them.

The dialogue was written a bit awkwardly, and in the end, the handling of the themes was a little too on-the-nose for my taste. The PC and their partner were never particularly defined as characters, and I think if they had been the emotions would have hit harder. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the experience, always ending each loop curious to see what would be different next time, and anticipating when and how I would break free.

This was an unusual one, starting with a short Twine piece that leads into a parser game. While the “a father made this for his daughter and wants her to play it right now in the hospital” conceit led me to expect a fairly small, simple parser game, it was actually quite large, with many rooms, hidden objects, and multiple NPCs. I started out exploring all the places and collecting all the things; the notes especially were an intriguing layer, and I felt motivated to hunt them down (I wish I could have talked about them to the dad in the “after” segment). So I was settling deep into the parser, when… I realized that my two hours of IFComp playtime were almost up.

Since I wanted to get to the second Twine part before my judging window ran out, I went ahead and skipped to that one without having reached the end of the parser game. Which made the experience of playing out that portion fall somewhat flat, because the PC had finished the game, whereas I hadn’t. It didn’t help that I had already felt at a distance from the PC in the first segment; for example, when I got the choice of whether or not to lie to my mom, I had no idea why the PC might want to. I couldn’t get a read on her relationship with James, either.

The parser game also suffered from some typos, lack of implementation, and disambiguation issues; at first I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, painting the dad character as an imperfect programmer, but nothing in the game supported that reading, so I think it just needed a bit more polish.

As a whole, I didn’t emotionally connect with this game, and I think the large-parser-between-two-Twines format wasn’t ideally suited to a comp with a two-hour judging window. But I did enjoy my time in the parser game, and will definitely be going back to explore more.

I liked this game a lot! It’s very aesthetically pleasing, with soft, shifting-color backgrounds, a map that expands as you go deeper, and lovely art. The engine worked well and made for a smooth choice-parser hybrid experience. After a bit of a slow start, I became invested in the PC’s forest exploration, partially due to her strong voice—her youthful enthusiasm and joy are captured so well. Discovering new things to photograph, interact with, and collect for my sample box was delightful, especially since trying each action on each item has its own unique flavor text. For instance, photos of certain things may come out blurry or not live up to what they’re trying to capture, which was an excellent detail. All in all, this really captured the experience of going on a rambling forest hike.

A layer of intrigue was added once the worldbuilding started trickling in, creating a sense of potential danger in the forest and of precarity about life in general in this world. The small-scale stakes of potentially getting lost, getting in trouble for sneaking out, or even getting attacked by a creature played out against an off-screen backdrop of warring ideologies and a forever-damaged planet. The way that glimpses of this larger geopolitical situation were meted out throughout the story was very effective, providing one puzzle piece at a time that never formed the whole picture, but were enough to convey a strong impression.

I love exploration in games, and this was a thoroughly satisfying experience on that front, with a few small puzzles along the way and an enjoyable PC to spend the time with, along with a compelling world to do it in.

I didn’t realize to what extent this game was based on the song mentioned as inspiration (“The Blessings” by Dar Williams) until I looked up the lyrics:

And the blessings were like poets that we never find time to know,
But when time stopped I found the place where the poets go.
And they said, "Here have some coffee, it’s straight, black and very old, "
And they gave me sticks and rocks and stars and all that I could hold…

Honestly, I’m super impressed at the way the authors ran with these lines, implementing them very literally into this surreal game about a PC processing the end of a relationship (and now I know the answer to my questions “Why sticks? Why rocks?”).

I love character/emotion/relationship-focused games, so I liked the premise of this one and enjoyed playing out the layers of the PC’s self-reflection and increasing insights. I think the game would have resonated more with me emotionally, though, if both the PC and their ex were more developed as characters; as-is, neither is named and both are characterized fairly vaguely, with some glimpses of their personalities and the tenor of their relationship, but not enough for my taste.

The puzzles and the surreal environments were fun, and I enjoyed the kind-of twist that not all puzzles in each location were fully solvable at first. Because of the unintuitive nature of some puzzles, though, I definitely resorted to lawnmowering several times (and I ran into one minor puzzle-related bug).

Highlight: Mouse friend!
Lowlight: After all the other animal-based puzzles required helping/being kind to them, I was disappointed to have to throw a rock at a bat.