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.

An excellent cosy sci-fi game, albeit one that ended on a sudden note. You play as a lone captain of a spaceship, spending your days tending the ship and browsing the internet. I love atmosphere here, the slow life of an old but well-loved ship, the repetitive daily routine. Especially love the internet pages, glimpses of a society that, despite being in space, feel so human and similar to our own. People are still arguing about the superstition against buying your own first tarot deck!

The incorporation of the occult and tarot in general, but transformed into a more sci-fi lens. The tarot deck that can project card meanings, ritualised electric lighting. It's very cool and I'd love to see more of it.

“I want to see more of it,” is my main comment about this game in general. I like the second half of the game, which had the same great writing and atmosphere as on the ship, but it left me with many questions. We get a lot of tantalising details about the backstory here — the cult (?), the protagonist's relationship with their father, and why they want to leave. I expected more of an explanation, and the way it left off was a bit unsatisfying.

What we do have here is really enjoyable, though — I'll keep an eye on it if it ever gets an update or an expansion.

A really fun puzzle game, one of my favourites from the 2024 IFComp. This is an escape game, of two teenagers escaping the underground bunker they've been raised in.

It's a parser-choice hybrid — you navigate and advance the story through links, but there are points requiring text input (passwords and such). There's areas to explore and revisit at any time, plus inventory. I really like this setup. The navigation felt smooth, the UI clear and understandable. Love the little quality of life touches as well — the ticking off rooms when you've finished with it, the symbols showing locked doors, the station lists on every computer. I didn't even need to take notes!

The puzzles are really fun to figure out, and felt naturally intergrated into the world/narrative. The two protagonists Aiden and Vee are separated early on, a lot of the progression consists of them opening passages for each other, finding hints and passwords for the other to want to use etc. At any point you have multiple avenues of investigation and areas to explore, which combined with the quality of life stuff made the game feel quite smooth. Aiden and Vee can contact each other and their exchanges act as a diagetic hint system, which I appreciated.

This game is just fun. A comedic parody of RPG games that didn't take itself seriously, with lines and events that made me laugh out loud so many times. I saw some reviews saying this sort of parody is overdone, but it's the first time I've encountered this type of game and I found it delightful.

Jasmine has lost her favourite teacup, and obviously there's nothing else to do than go on a quest to retrieve it. At multiple points you're given the choice to go home, or escalate this absurd quest even further, with with sensible choice always leading to a Bad End. Will you really go confront Actual Literal Satan over one teacup that doesn't even have a pattern on it anymore because it washed off? Yes, of course you will.

I laughed out loud so many times. (Spoiler - click to show) Choosing the path to “the swamp of an instant inevitable doom” means Jasmine will immediately walk into a poisoned swamp and die. If answer the genie's questions wrong, he will punt you out of the screen, into the swamp, and you die. Satan protesting his power is too mighty, how dare you accuse him of just walking into a house to steal one small teacup??? When that's exactly what he did.

I didn't mind the walking animations; I found it added character, and it was incorporated into the comedy really nicely. This shock of Jasmine just, walking straight into the death swamp. That long sequence of her climbing up the stairs!

And that last (Spoiler - click to show) battle with Satan. Love that your HP just — doesn't change, doesn't mean anything, all the numbers are lies, I one-shot killed him with an insult.

A beloved spaceship captain has died, and ship AI, a lover of mysteries, is eager to investigate.

Unlike a traditional whodunnit, it focuses more on storytelling and exploring different possibilities. There isn't a single murderer to identify: you can accuse anyone and read a version of events where they're guilty. Some of them don't involve murder at all — so far I've seen endings where (Spoiler - click to show) the "AI" is a child playing pretend, one where the captain died of a natural heart attack, and one where he took his own life and staged it as a murder scene as a final gift to you.

This is a multi-author collaboration where each author wrote a character, and the endings have been fascinating stories in and of themselves. I find reading them to be a better experience than actually playing the game.

My playing experience definitely suffered from diving into this game right a different murder mystery game. There is a 30-minute IRL timer to identify a suspect, and since you can find evidence pointing toward almost anyone, plus the non-murder possibilities, the evidence for each suspect is sparse and contradictory. Going in I had expectations of a traditional mystery, but instead found plenty of vague clues and suspicious events without clear ways to either rule people out or confirm guilt. At 30 minutes in I couldn’t single out one person who seemed definitively guiltier than the others, and I had no idea how some of my evidence fit together. I was rather disappointed when I discovered that there is no additional evidence and the clues are deliberately contradictory. The limited clues made the investigation less smooth too — if I found an inconsistency, there was little chance I could follow up on it by investigating more or confronting a suspect.

I think this game would benefit from setting the player’s expectations better, making it clear that this isn’t a murder with a single solution.

A murder mystery set in Antarctica!

The PC is a maintenance worker at a small station during the winter season, whose brother Daniel (also a worker there), has been murdered. First of all, this is such a good explanation for the “locked down with limited suspects” setup and why an ordinary person is investigating the case. The writing is evocative and represents this well — I loved the atmosphere of the isolated station, the cold starkness, the increasing stress as the killer starts to retaliate against you. The scenery descriptions change throughout to become more ominous, which was a nice touch. The writing was well done, you get the sense of a grieving, frantic person who's not the most professional at investigating, and the character dynamics and relationships felt natural.

The main gameplay revolves around talking to colleagues, establishing alibis, sorting out their relationships to Daniel and each other, and determining possible motives. The game responded well to the information you gained — if you learned an incriminating fact you could confront that person and get the option to talk about it. I rarely felt that I was stuck, at any moment there was at least one thing I'm following up on, it felt natural to chase one lead after another.

The game adds complications as everyone moves around the station, and it can take a while to track down a specific person. You have to sleep and engage in various activities to manage stress, and you need to do activities with specific characters to increase rapport with them and get them to share information. The officials arrive in 10 days, so there's a trade-off between paying attention to self care and friendships, and pushing through the investigation. The killer also sabotages things to distract you and waste your time, which nicely added to the increasingly tense atmosphere.

I identified the killer by (Spoiler - click to show) getting into Daniel's phone and finding a note the killer wrote, but I got too stressed at the end and killed him accidentally, oops, so I never found out his motives or the murder weapon (although I suspect it's related to Jack's faulty data and Daniel being nosy). It would be interesting to replay and focus on Jack, to see what else I can discover.