Ratings and Reviews by iaraya

I went into this game intrigued by the blurb’s statement that several totally different playthroughs are all possible, and the game definitely lived up to that premise!

It truly feels open-ended. It takes place at a festival and captures that atmosphere, at any given moment there are so many different people to talk to and things happening in different places. You will always miss things. The protagonist Irene can choose to pursue her own goal of getting a permit to wear trousers in the forest (which I did eventually manage), or go off and investigate the many mysterious happenings: the invisible crying man and the poet, the strange Burber, a political conspiracy, all of which intersect in various ways. It can be confusing in the beginning since you don't have context for the things and people you, but over time one can follow each thread and begin figure out how it's all connected.

After completing seven or eight playthroughs over a week, I think I have a good idea of what’s going on? But there are still many things that I have not seen. I think that is longer than most players, but I kept having new ideas for things I wanted to see and try, each playthrough answering some questions and bringing up new ones. I wrote up my notes on the story and timeline of events on the forum here (spoilers galore).

The UI is great. The background changes, and the text is at a very readable size and leading. The updating reminders of current objectives are very useful, as are the prompts to auto-navigate to quest locations, which cuts down on constantly opening the map or missing things from poor navigation. Some of the images look out of place and a bit amateurish, however, as there isn’t a consistent style among the different graphics. But that is a small quibble.

I think the storyline I’m most intrigued by is (Spoiler - click to show)the aunt, currently pretending to be a Burber. She knows so much seemingly about the political assassination plot against her brother and is fighting with one of the conspirators — what is she trying to accomplish here? And her illness, brought on by dreams that come true, surely connects to the crying man come alive from the poem, but how? Gloria, too; the game starts with a warning about her and I still have no idea what her deal is.

I will definitely come back to this at some points, try to find out more about my unanswed questions

This is a strange and surreal little game. It begins with three mysterious figures urging you to be more positive, before you wake up on the Monday of a workweek, in a bland office with colleagues you don’t like, who never acknowledge you. There’s also a cafe guy whose attention you really want. For a while, I thought this was a slice-of-life commentary on the drudgery of office work or similar, the gradual realisation that (Spoiler - click to show)you are a ghost was a great experience.

Putting together the story from the fragmented clues is fascinating, your actions and goals slowly making sense. From what I gather, (Spoiler - click to show)these three people accidentally left a co-worker at the bottom of a ravine and didn’t care enough to check for her or notice she was gone? My rituals got their attention, made them remember her and rescue her in time. From other reviews, I see this is the good ending, it’s also possible to return her to life as a zombie, and also to kill cafe guy? I’ll have to replay this at some point and put more effort into discovering more of the story, find other endings.

Also, kudos to the author for their attention to typography. The placement of images, the contrast, font choice and font size, are very pleasing to the eye.

This was so charming and cosy. You play as a guest at an enchanted house whose owner is strangely absent, so in the meantime you get to know the house and its occupants.

The characters and the writing are the highlight — the octopus in the kitchen, the talking skull and sentient Mess in the study, the talking furniture. It’s so fun talking to all of them, getting their opinions on various aspects of the house and each other.

The dialogue is delightful — you can ask, for example, the furniture about their favourite varnish, the ghost about his favourite book. And the library bookshelf! A lovely ASCII art bookshelf filled with tomes oit’s very fun to click on all the titles and see a Heinlein book on the same row as *The Red Book of Westmarch* by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

The game is polished and well-designed. It’s a parser-choice hybrid where you can visit all the rooms of the house at any time, navigating and talking to people via hyperlinks. There are so many conversation topics that it would be tedious to have to type a command to view the list each time. The puzzles are smooth and make sense. When I got stuck, it was easy to make rounds of all the rooms to check for things I’d forgotten about. The way the game removes links when I didn’t need them anymore is very useful.

Some parts are a bit tedious, for example the arbitration between the ghost and furniture that has you playing messenger for a few rounds, but the fun dialogue made up for it.

Overall, a really enjoyable and charming game.