Ratings and Reviews by pieartsy

A delightful game! After a bit of an awkward and rushed start, it really eases into itself once you enter the forest proper. Lara, the protagonist, is clearly young, and their excitement and wonder at her experiences in the forest was infectious. Even in tense, objectively scary parts like the water tower collapse and the monitor lizards, I never got a feeling of dread, rather the childlike ability to just “take it on the chin” and let extraordinary experiences wow me as much as little caterpillars in the wood did. Also, it was adorable trying to “polish” the silver ring with bleach and only end up tarnishing it further, to Lara’s confusion.

I loved being able to take pictures and samples of various objects in the forest, from fossils to food wrappers. I’m a city bean, so I never experienced these things as a child and only a bit as an adult, but with the vivid descriptions, I felt transported into the world of the game. I loved the joy of being in the brook the most, and Lara’s curiosity about all the strange bugs.

Some of my favorite descriptions:

> It's hard even to know where the sun must be, down in this dark emerald tunnel where the water sings.

> I feel something like a blow to my whole body, because it's in full sunlight and so white that its glow is like a hammer.

This is all the more impressive since English is not Pseudavid’s first language! The somewhat awkward ESL wordings at points were ignorable, and the evocative imagery captured far more of my attention. I also liked that the choices and observations that Lara made lingered past the initial passage—for example, after discovering the bullet shells, Lara will think about the hunters for several passages afterward. It made treading the same paths over and over more interesting and full of variety where in other games it could’ve gotten monotonous.

I am intrigued by the world of the game, as it indicates in some parts that it’s post-apocalyptic or something, though Lara still has a phone with signal and there’s enough technology for drones, so that can’t be 100% correct. Still, her excitement about “real plastic!” in the hut and some other references to a flood and the orange dust from the Sahara (implied to be close?) made me quirk an eyebrow in curiosity. Of course, as a child, she doesn’t have too many in-depth thoughts about the situation she lives in. Any odd behavior of the forest was waved away by her blitheness, merely tricks of the light.

I chose not to walk further and just went home at the end after I found a route back, and got told “I have the feeling I’m missing something”, which only makes me want to play again in the future (after the competition) to see what I have yet to discover!

Oh, and I almost forgot, the styling of the game was lovely! I loved the shifting gradients and illustrations a lot, and I kept turning my sound up, imagining birdsong in the air.

I have a few niggling critiques: the map popped up on top of the illustrations sometimes, a variable was still called `through_the_forest` at one point, and navigating the inventory was rather awkward, especially when trying to use an object. I was confused by both the red rock location and the fork past the red rock being described as the furthest Lara has ever gone on her own, and didn’t quite understand how to read the map—a “You are Here” marker would’ve helped immensely! And I do wish the ending was a little more satisfying of a wrap-up– However, these are all relatively minor.

Really great game, I recommend you give it a shot!

Oh my god the timed text. Oh god. I’m not as big of a hater on timed text as some, having used it in many of my pieces, but this was really excruciating. I generally limit my timed text to 2 seconds at the most, with my average being half a second. Alas, that was not the case here.

I get that it’s thematic to some degree, to be forced to pause and wait while the protagonist forces their words out of their mouth, but jeez, a lot of the timed text for others speaking or for the prose itself was unnecessary and some of the pauses were extremely long for reasons I couldn’t discern, such as with the flashbacks being meted out sentence. By. Sentence.

Yes, it tried to put me in the head of someone who stutters. While I can see how annoyance at the timed text would bleed nicely into being annoyed at myself-as-protagonist (assuming the timed text was exclusive to stuttering-related sentences or effects), having the timed text *everywhere* just led to annoyance at the game in general. I considered quitting several times, including on the first screen, during what felt like 5-6 second pauses between phrases. The jittering animations didn’t really help either—at least, though, you could turn those off for accessibility…unlike with the timed text.

I think the story was okay, though I’m biased since I’m not super big on slice of life. The attempt at a heartwarming end felt like it came out of nowhere because I don’t remember Clementine being shown as a compassionate or close friend of the protagonist’s—or, really, being shown at all— until that scene. I didn’t really feel any connection or stirring emotion there.

I feel kind of bad for talking critically about this piece when it’s depicting a real disorder in a sympathetic and realistic light. I will say that I did gain more awareness of what it’s like to have a stutter, so on that merit alone I did appreciate it.

This game was really charming! You find yourself waking with amnesia in the belly of a whale. I ended in half an hour with 17 sanity and 21 passages seen altogether– though since there are clearly 90 passages to be seen in total, I definitely missed a bunch.

Having gotten an extremely good ending (Spoiler - click to show)of becoming the whale’s keeper with Jonah and getting the vague impression that several other endings were not-as-pleasant, I don’t feel a strong desire to replay (not due to it being uninteresting or unengaging, but rather because I am a weenie with horror and such).

The prose is written evocatively and I felt drawn into the depths of the mystery just like the protagonist. With that and the beautiful inked pictures in the beginning (though I think they lessened over time?) I felt the majesty of the whale almost as much as the protagonist did – it almost made me wish that I could experience such a thing as a whale’s call from inside the whale! However the amnesia bit is a little overplayed in my opinion.

Jonah was a cheerful character and I couldn’t imagine hurting him when he was so kind and excitable. I felt tension with some choices in hoping I wouldn’t upset him or make a misstep since we didn’t speak the same language. Who he was, how he got there, etc were intriguing questions, but the game’s ending soothed me with the idea that it didn’t matter.

The Plotopolis system is slick, designed to be played on the Telegraph phone app but working on the web just as well. I spotted no typos or bugs whatsoever.

As someone who loves the ocean, I felt very soothed by the game. At least with my ending, it felt like a dream where you wake up feeling refreshed rather than exhausted. Good job!

I was curious as to why this one wasn’t just a prose story, then I checked the author’s website and saw that the bulk of it already *was* a prose story. It seemed not-quite-interesting-enough to be a prose story by itself but much too long to be a book within a proper game…unfortunately I skimmed a lot of it wondering when choices would actually happen in the IF game, whereas if it were presented to me as a short static fiction I would’ve read more carefully and enjoyed it as it was clearly intended, i.e. a novella.

It felt like that prose story with 0 choices was The Point of the game with the other history books being backstory and the choices being somewhat window dressing to wrap up that story. Even at the end of the game when choices ostensibly come back, it’s pretty much “click to progress” which was functionally the same as the “turn page” button in the book parts. I think the crucial branching choice was basically deciding whether Anhah (or whatever the spelling was) would stay in the library or we would take her with us.

At first I was confused as to why the East was pretty 1:1 with actual Chinese history, locations, and mythology and the West was really fantastical and not really grounded in actual history (at least as far as I could tell?), but upon writing this review I realized that it’s what Europe *always does* to China so maybe they need a taste of their own medicine!

In short, if I wanted to read a short story I would’ve just read a short story, not tried to play an IFComp game.