Ratings and Reviews by pieartsy

As someone who's a fan of a certain folktale and tabletop roleplaying game riffing off of it, this was a lovely and creepy take on the story of (Spoiler - click to show)Bluebeard.

The letter-writing mechanic is simple but clever, and the writing itself holds together in a subtly creepy fashion. You are primed to the idea that this is one person trying to write and rewrite these letters to her sister-- that feeling contributes to the obsession and distress present in the story.

I do feel like more build-up could've been present regarding the attic, but it was a 4 hour game so, as-is, it works.

This was a trippy game. It felt raw and beautiful in its depiction of ugly emotions and behaviors, in a way that reminded me of porpentine’s neon overstim nightmares. A wondrous headache of an experience. The art and effects were stunning aesthetic glitchy eyesores. Invoked all the right feelings, and they were all horrid and gross. I only played once, which was more than enough for me.

When I use words like eyesore, gross, headache, ugly, I use them with the impression that the author would be pleased by these descriptions. If the author is not, then I wish to assure them that I use these words in a positive and impressed way.

An odd little tidbit of a game that didn’t feel quite complete, but was interesting nonetheless. I liked the little poems and word snippets written by the author. (Spoiler - click to show)Is there nothing you can do regarding the lizardfolk utterly destroying your facility? Is that just how the game always ends? I wanted to wrestle with the moral questions it started to raise, but I didn’t have the chance to.

I think the thing that quirked my mouth up the most about this game is the dead-on impression of ChatGPT and AI like it, from the memory core. I kinda wanted to see more of that.

I did not like this game very much. I suck at parsers, and this game (unlike the other, much kinder, parsers I've played) doesn’t try to hold your hand about it. In fact (to continue the metaphor) it seemed to actively slap my hand for sucking at parsers. Though I guess I can’t hold that too hard against it given it bills itself as “fiendishly difficult”.

I did like the fan puzzle, that was the only pleasing one for me. After I got the rectangle from the slot machine, I wasted an unpleasant amount of time trying to get 3 stars and see what could be gotten from that, only to find out it was utterly pointless to do so. I tried turning the timer as soon as I had that ability and was told I couldn’t do it, not realizing that I had to wait until it hit 30 seconds. So I also wasted a lot of time saving and restoring, because I thought I literally had <60 moves to solve everything and that’s it and I didn’t want to find out how the ANNOYING ALL CAPS IMP was gonna condescendingly punish me for failing at the fiendishly difficult puzzles. The hint system doesn’t describe how to actually work the lamps, which felt like a major flaw in a player aid that’s supposed to help you solve the game.

The puzzles seem very clever and the implementation is probably very genius on the inside, but none of that panned out to a game I actually enjoyed.