Ratings and Reviews by iaraya

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.