Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

I played this one a few weeks ago now, and I’m not going to talk about the puzzles or gameplay or implementation at all, because I know other people will cover them and they aren’t what stuck with me. What I remember about this game is the sense of inevitability; you will progress, you will go onward (you don’t navigate with directional commands, just “forward”), deeper into this cave system, closer to your fate.

What is the fate that awaits you at the end, and why are you being compelled toward it? These are questions that arise early on, as I wondered why the PC, accompanied by two guards as well as someone called “the heir” who seems to be their lover, was being brought to this place with no say in the matter. There’s clearly a purpose to it, one the heir fully believes in; we don’t know what the PC thinks.

The guards start out derisive, disgusted by the PC (again for reasons unknown), but as you progress, a transformation begins. (Spoiler - click to show)You start falling apart, skin peeling away, fluids oozing out—and your companions transform too, in their attitude toward you, the guards becoming fawning and worshipful, wanting to taste your leavings, while the heir grows near-ecstatic. We’re leading up to something, to a conclusion, a revelation… except not, because the game ends before bringing any of this together; it’s another “Part 1” situation, weirdly common in this comp, but this one didn’t warn about that in the front matter, so I had no idea that it wasn’t a complete work in itself (okay, looking back at the comp page just now, there is a “Part 1: The Descent” subtitle [which here on IFDB is part of the blurb, making it even clearer], but in my defense the placement and formatting of the subtitles on that page has led my eyes to skip over them, so I hadn’t noticed it before). So while there’s certainly an interesting setup here, sadly it doesn’t go anywhere in this piece.

An edited version of a review originally posted at intfiction.org on September 24, 2025

I... did not enjoy this game, for multiple reasons. One was that it's buggy; it frequently referenced choices I hadn’t made and items I didn’t have with me. But much more significant was that it’s gross toward its female characters, including playing the idea of sexual assault for laughs.

BERT: Who has the gold?
SEWARD: The King. It is well-guarded, in the castle.
CICILIA: As is my sister. [...] I guess she was the beautiful one.

Cicilia later elaborates, "Every maiden, when she comes of age, must present herself at the castle. Some never return." And later we get very explicit clarification:

BERT: Is she being violated, there?
CICILIA: Of course.

However, Cicilia is not actually particularly concerned about her sister; she's more focused on aggressively flirting with the PC and fretting that she wasn't being beautiful enough to be taken. Besides the cavalier treatment of the sister being kidnapped, this is a case of a female character being written shallowly to prop up the male protagonist (who, frankly, has done nothing to deserve her attention except... be from the 21st century).

She winks. Is she flirting or suggesting that…
CICILIA: She’s the most beautiful girl in the village, you know. And unmarried. Unsullied. We think. A Wizard for a husband! What girl should be so lucky?
BERT: Are you trying to seduce me on behalf of your…
CICILIA: Legs like this!
CICILIA lifts her skirts.

Overall, I found the story and the main character actively unpleasant. His attitude made sense at the beginning, while he was being treated like crap at a miserable retail job, but he's also a total asshole to his mom and friends. He then gets rewarded with the opportunity to become a hero in a poorly-realized version of the medieval era. Very much not a game for me.

The opening of this one had me intrigued, with the PC waking up with amnesia on a boat surrounded by five shadow-selves. You have to travel to five islands to get back your memories, which for the player means gaining more and more of an understanding of this world and what led the protagonist to be in this situation. Sadly, I can't say I fully enjoyed this process--the PC is a pretty unpleasant person, and unluckily for me, the first island I picked had gameplay that fell afoul of Brian Rushton's “a perfect simulation of a boring or annoying situation is boring or annoying” wisdom. Made to complete a series of repetitive tasks, the PC becomes angry at the NPC giving the orders; meanwhile, I became frustrated at the game for simulating tedium too well.

I'm not sure if I was meant to empathize with the PC once I got the full story. (Spoiler - click to show)Basically, the presence of gods and spirits in the human world started giving people a nasty illness that makes them deteriorate and fall apart... and the PC decided that the best way to do that was to defeat and drive them out forever. I had a lot of questions, though, like--did anyone try talking to the spirits about this? Did anyone investigate to learn why this was happening and if anything less drastic could be done about it? Because of my lack of conviction that the PC's course of action was the right one, I didn't feel aligned with his goals during the climactic ending section(Spoiler - click to show), and certainly wasn't happy when he inevitably triumphed.

It is very possible that I missed or overlooked some crucial piece of the story; after encountering that tedious section, I was somewhat disengaged from the rest of the game. I'm interested in reading more reviews to see what others make of this one.

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!