Ratings and Reviews by Naarel

[untagged spoilers ahead]

I remember receiving some "Wow, that's such a refreshing take on a modern vampire! That's so rare these days!" comments under my Shufflecomp entry, oxblood, and thinking to myself: did nobody play Sleepless in the Sapphire City, or its follow-up, UNDEAD/YRSELF? Because I played them and they were quite inspiring to me, to the point where I put them both in the Special Credits section in the itch description. And Sleepless... was released in 2024! It was in the Indiepocalypse! Why is nobody talking about it?! I have to do everything all by myself in this house, etc etc.

What's the deal with Sleepless... then? We follow Evelin, a vampire, on a hunting trip, since vampires need blood to function and it isn't something you can Doordash (for obvious reasons, but also for less obvious reasons which I'll get into in a bit). That's the most basic description of what happens. All of the events, thoughts, and memories are relayed in a three-column format, in what I consider to be three different voices or viewpoints, and if you know anything about me, you know I love it when the text formatting matters in a game. So I was sold instantly, on a heavy discount at that.

Before we go on, I think I should explain what exactly is the appeal of a vampire for me. I had a long talk with one of my friends about this, and I came to a conclusion that I love my vampires as The Other, but in a very liminal way, where they are clearly inhuman, and yet stuck in the human world and forced to deal with human rules which no longer apply to them. I'm not entirely interested in the narrative of a vampire as a predator or a hunter (though it can be nice!), rather, I'm interested in seeing how the world, with its rules unchanged entirely, turns on those who lived in it without problems before they became something else. Not a vampire as an animal filled with violent urges, but rather, a vampire as a social animal, suddenly deprived of the "social" part of its life.

I quickly realized that sometimes, vampire fiction feels stale or samey to me because it overly focuses on vampirism through the lens of being a danger or an inconvenience to those around the vampire. The only types of allowed pain are the grand pain of no longer being human and the crippling anxiety coming with the urge to drink blood. Ah, how I don't want to kill, and yet I must! Oh, how tortured and unnatural I am in the perfect and just human world! I am but a blemish on the spotless face of this planet, woe is me!"

And I think that one of the points that draws me to Sleepless... is the fact that the setting isn't hostile to Evelin just because she's a vampire — the setting is hostile to everyone, but Evelin's nature as a vampire makes the hostility more pronounced. This is a capitalistic, uncaring hellscape. Brand names and logos burn like images and symbols of gods once used to do because in this reality, they are new gods. The blue light of phone screens is the artificial sunlight of the virtual world, and it burns just the same. And who needs a stake through the heart when a heartbreak is plenty? The city is full of cancerously overgrown derelict buildings, dead bodies behind shady clubs, everpresent cameras and screens. It's rotting, it's decaying, it's "dead behind the eyes". It would be wrong with or without a vampire in it.

Evelin can't go into the beating heart of the city because of all the things that could hurt her there, and she can't leave the city entirely, since there isn't that much blood out there. Therefore, she must exist in the margins of society, in places which were already sucked dry by the system and left to die. I phrase it this way because Evelin herself is (up until a certain point, which we'll get to) "completing the food chain" as a scavenger, feeding on corpses which just happen to be there (the term is, I believe, "necrophage"). And I think that's neat — in a world based on exploitation, a vampire refuses to kill, even with the burning thought that one day, it will probably be necessary for survival. For how long can you keep playing according to the rules? Is it even worth it? Should you even try, knowing it might eventually kill you? If you expect to sit a little with those questions and ponder, well, you don't get a lot of time, because not a short while after they're introduced, Evelin discovers the corpse she found isn't, in fact, a corpse, as she thought, and kills for the very first time.

An interlude to explain something I like to think about vampire fiction because this is unfortunately my review and I have you all hostage, but it'll also be relevant. Blood isn't anything taboo or gross for me because I saw (and accidentally swallowed, thanks to frequent nosebleeds) a whole lot of it ever since I was a child (because of blood tests which were regularly conducted on me, not like, anything sinister), so the gory aesthetic of it and its "forbidden nature" doesn't really land for me. I like my blood to be, unfortunately, baby's first symbolism, where blood is a stand-in for life, and the act of drinking blood is an act of partaking in someone else's life, of having someone else's life becoming a part of your life. This viewpoint is a part of why I love consensual blood drinking scenes — it's a special type of an intimate experience. But when you force yourself into someone else's life, or force them to dedicate a part of their life to you, or otherwise take a part of their life (or their entire life) with violence, it's a pretty bad thing, isn't it? Back to Sleepless... now. Remember what I said about the vampire being, to me, far more appealing as a social animal instead of just an animal?

Evelin's existence is painfully lonely. The people she loved the most, her mothers, are no longer in her life — one died, and one disappeared, and functionally it's just as good as being dead. She can't go to the clubs to meet anyone (because of the blue light there), she can't find anyone on the internet (again, blue light), every outing costs money (and why would she even have it in the first place?)... just where do you meet people when you can't enter spaces to meet people? And even if she could meet people, she still needs to watch out for her heart, so, what point even is there?

All of this talk so we can arrive at the scene which, frankly, kind of breaks me emotionally on some level. Because once Evelin finally kills someone, once she drinks that fresh and hot blood, she manages to briefly connect with someone else. She gets a brief glimpse into a different life, and through this, she briefly becomes alive again; it's no longer her blood and someone else's blood, but rather, their blood. She even kisses the remains after all is done. And I really wish I had words in either English or Polish to articulate how that scene feels but I don't. I really wish I had any words to describe what reading "I only want to discover, to understand/like the child who loved painting so much/he ate the art afterward" made me feel but it's a feeling so deep and viscerally familiar that it feels impossible at the moment.

This piece just understands a very specific type of loneliness. Some of us already live in a world which is hostile and inaccessible. Some of us live in a world where connecting with others outside is near impossible, not for the lack of trying, but for the lack of means to do so. Some of us are confined within empty spaces which are forgotten by the rest of the world. So you turn numb, feeding your need for connection on whatever scraps you can find. That's survival and it's enough until it isn't enough. What happens, then, once someone comes to you with their heart wide open? You're starving and you're afraid that they'll break your heart and leave, so you get your fill and destroy them before they can destroy you. It's a quick burst of something before another long and uncomfortable stretch of nothing.

And there are still many angles I could look at this story from. There is transness, for example (which is yet another layer of "othering"). There are also some advantages to a life lead outside of the norm. If nobody can see you on camera, you can do whatever, even in the surveillance state (as long as nobody else sees you). If your only worry is where to feed from, that already takes many more worries off of your shoulders. There's no need to care much about your appearance when you can't see yourself in the mirror.

And then there are relationships you have with your parents (mothers, in this case), and how they impact you forever. And there's loss of innocence, and if you can ever truly be fully innocent in a world which is very much not that. And there's the contrast of the city blue and blood red. And the uncomfortable fact that, if only there were more vampires, capitalism would find a way to profit off of them. And there's the lore, which I'm mildly aware of through my general consumption of other Nullaverse games. And there is this, and there is that, and there are so many angles I could still look at and dissect one by one, but this review has its fangs on my neck and I'm scared of what it'd see if it bit me.

I think that what I wrote here is still incomplete (maybe one day, I'll complete it) and I only stop here because I know I'd probably spend the entire Review-A-Thon just sitting there and making sure I wrote about absolutely everything, and I still have other games to write about. I really hope that what I wrote here makes it clear that Sleepless... is in some ways very special to me. I don't know. Just go read through it. Five stars. Get out of my head.

NOTE: this review will briefly talk about some sexual stuff (nothing explicit) and is probably not minor- or work-friendly. Also, I talk a bit about identity horror. Also, untagged spoilers I guess?

I generally have very little interest in the isekai genre. I played a couple of games where the protagonist is whisked away from their world and then placed in another, and they all kind of blended together. Many times the world was the same generic fantasy, or a protagonist was the blandest character possible and yet still was the object of everyone's oddly quickly found affections, or they were Gods' Speciallest Boy instantly upon arrival, and I guess none of that is for me.

But I still played Isekai by dott. Piergiorgio when it was first released I believe, back in 2025. Why? I can't remember. What I do remember is that it intrigued me for reasons I can't entirely articulate (I'll try to articulate them in this review; no promises though). Back then, my save file corrupted and I left the game without winning it, only having scratched the surface of available playable content. I just finished my second playthrough, which I won, so while some of my thoughts from the first playthrough had some time to mature, others are still kinda fresh. Unfortunately, for some reason I wasn't allowed to make a save or even start a transcript, as I was getting persistent errors, which I assume could be my fault somehow. I also accidentally closed the interpreter so I unfortunately won't provide you with any quotes. Please just trust me. Thank you.

So, what is Isekai all about? You play as an unnamed human man who awakens to a strange world in the body of an elf woman. Your task? Figure out who that elf is and what is this place. As time passes and your exploration progresses, you learn more about the world and the elf whose body you inhabit. Standard stuff in the "I woke up as someone else in a different world???" genre of isekai.

Some technical things before I get into other stuff. This is a "preview" version of the game and I don't know if it means it's a demo or a beta version of some kind or whatever. Either way, some parts of the game seem to be a little out of order sometimes — for example, text sometimes referred to a bodice which I already took off, or mused about whether or not the elf main character is married to the angel and demon characters long after I discovered that this is the case. I will take the most charitable route and will assume this is something which is meant to be polished in later iterations. I will also not comment on the quality of the prose because I'm sure most of this is a result of English not being the author's first language, and I don't want to pick on that, especially since the author himself requested to not do this in the past. I have to say that some descriptions are hard to follow and my eyes were glazing over them, but this could also be due to the fact that they were long and I had to play the whole game in one sitting due to saves not working. Oh well. Additionally, the narration switches often between "I" and "you", though I'm not entirely sure if it's a bug or a feature, as I'll explain later. I will also refrain from musing about whether or not this work exists to satisfy any particular fetish because if it doesn't, then I'm putting someone in a very weird position, and if it does, then it's literally not my business, good for the author.

(You CAN touch yourself in-game, literally and figuratively, which in addition to some other clearly sexually charged scenes leads me to believe that I might be doing something wrong by excluding the sexual angle, but I really don't want to dissect someone else's sexuality like this. I think it's kinda gross. The author doesn't tag it as "pornography" or anything either, which is yet another reason why I'm not touching on that angle.)

So, we wake up in the body of Etuye Alasne, an elf woman blessed with a pair of large breasts (the game doesn't let you forget about it, and it's even partially relevant at one point when we have to retrieve an amulet from between them) and two wives — an angel named Miyai and a demon called Azuj. (Their real names are much longer but let's keep it like this for the sake of clarity. I don't even mention them again anyway). The wives are out of the house for some reason, but that's fine since it gives us time to explore and find out more about our isekai'd self and the world around us.

I have to say, the world is... interesting, in several ways. This is a world of elves, angels, demons, and dragons. There are mages and warriors, and most stuff you'd expect from a fantasy world. Magic is an art similar to science, measurable and provable, which I usually like. There are some worldbuilding choices which were very fun for me, like elves having six fingers on each hand (the sixth finger being another thumb) and or being able to see temperature, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out how they came back in smaller details later (thermal paint announcing whose house we're in being warm to the sight since we're at a married throuple's house, a base-12 counting system being used instead of a base-10).

Another intriguing part is the strange dissonance happening around things which our world would consider, to one degree or another, taboo, or at least unsavory or unsightly in some way. Urination and defecation, for example, aren't something that is confined to an enclosed bathroom stall, but rather, is something done in an open room where others can watch. Adults can breastfeed each other, which is entirely non-sexual in nature (the text makes sure you know that. It's actually kind of heavy-handed about it). Nakedness is not a cause for embarrassment, just another part of life, and sexual acts are freely represented in the literature. I don't think I'd really think "Wow, they piss in front of each other? How weird and shameless!" because one: urinals exist, two: humanity's been publicly relieving itself even back in Ancient Rome in public latrines which provided no privacy whatsoever. I would also believe that nakedness isn't anything taboo, considering many indigenous cultures around the world have no problem with it. Breastfeeding, perhaps that'd raise my brow, but I could imagine a world where it's nothing but a bonding activity, an entirely asexual show of one's care for the other. But the text is adamant on reminding us at every step about how completely normal and non-sexual all of this is, in turn drawing attention to how not normal and sexual it would be in our world, creating a bit of an uncomfortable space. It's the "don't think about an elephant" phenomenon — of course you're going to think about an elephant now! If we're constantly reminded about how strange and unusual a thing is, it doesn't matter how often we reiterate it's actually fine and normal.

It made me think that this game exists in several liminal spaces. There's a space between the unnamed male protagonist and Etuye Alasne. There's a space between "our world" and the world of Railei. There's a space between shameless nakedness and a reminder that we should be ashamed of it. This is what makes Isekai so intriguing to me, and this is why I wanted to write about it for a long time. This is, also, what makes writing about Isekai hard for me. Because the problem is: how much of it is the dissonance of the author and how much of it is the dissonance of the main character?

The Nameless Man (who we'll call Sailor from now on, since that's his profession) and Etuye are, as the game reveals, the same person, separated by thousands of years. Reincarnation is real in the Materia of Railei-verse, and the Sailor is simply a far younger version of Etuye from the distant past. Over the course of the game, Sailor slowly grows into Etuye's body and mindset, so to speak, but he still starts from the perspective of someone from Earth. Of course, I could read it from the "author just writes what he thinks is hot but is afraid to commit so he says it's not sexual" angle, but I think there's another angle which makes it more interesting for me, which is identity horror, which I love. Do I think it was intended? No, but this is my review, go write your own if you don't like it.

Because think about it for a moment: you wake up in a body that isn't yours, in a world that's not yours, filled with customs which are entirely foreign to you. You are a man trapped in a woman's body, literally, and by gods, there are now two blobs of flesh and fat that jiggle on your chest as you walk, do you even know how massive breasts can seem when you're not supposed to have them, how weirdly conscious you can be of their every move? And the time passes, and you remain nameless as memories of someone else enter your head as if they were your own (because they ARE your own!), and things which you'd never think about become intuitive. Someone else looks at you from the mirror and it's their name you think about as you think about your own name. You read about yourself in a diary written in someone else's hand, with your name rendered in unsure shaky strokes, and you two are one and the same, and you two are separate, and both are true at the same time. All that is natural to Raileian Etuye is strange to Earthen Sailor, and the dissonance comes from their two mindsets melting together as Sailor slowly fades away into his older form. Is Etuye somewhere on Earth with her hand sliding across her uncomfortably flat chest? Is she plagued with a vague feeling that public defecation, which is a completely normal thing, is actually strange and gross?

It's... challenging to try and practice the "death of the author" mentality in a space where the author is very much alive and will tell you where your interpretation sucks, but that doesn't stop me from trying. Isekai is a strange experience, one which I enjoyed in some perverse (Meaning: obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted, not inputting commands with one hand) manner and even found somewhat inspiring due to its strangeness. Recommending it to someone would probably be going a little too far, especially in its current state, but I am waiting to see where a more full version goes, once it releases. I don't know. This is definitely a game which exists, and I'm glad it does, actually.

The year is 2024. I just returned to my roots and reconnected with my deep desire to engage with all things interactive fiction. This is the first year during which I get to witness the grand event, which is IFComp. There are 67 entries total that year, the 67th one being Uninteractive Fiction by Leah Targic. "The only winning move is not to play", the description says, and it's true: pressing "Play" leads to the player losing. There is even a failure sound effect... and nothing more. Press play, lose.

Of course, the goal of the game was losing — both on the in-game layer and the meta layer, if I understand things correctly. It did, however, do much more: it sparked discussion and jokes within the community. Many wondered about secret hidden brilliance, combed through the source code, made detailed reviews. This isn't to say that Uninteractive Fiction was universally acclaimed. Some people still rolled their eyes at an obvious joke they found unfunny, and they had a right to do so. But now, two years later, we're still referencing it with a bit of humor-laced fondness. It was, in the end, just a joke: whether you consider it funny or not, that's up to you.

Yesterday, a dear friend sent me a link to The Minimalist Game and referenced Uninteractive Fiction. The similarity is very strong: The Minimalist Game combines in itself both the "you lose" aspect of Uninteractive Fiction and the "you win" aspect of Uninteractive Fiction 2. TMG, however, is a parser, which was a much more fashionable form at the time, giving the player a little more to do. Do you want to win? Type it in. Make contact with the keyboard. Make your will known. I believe typing might be a little more impactful than a simple click (I played the Twine version of TMG... it just didn't hit the same), so I enjoyed TMG a little bit more than UF1 and UF2.

I wasn't there in 2010s (I was too busy being 10, I think. I don't remember that well) and I have no way to check what the sentiments were back in the day, save for the reviews on IFDB, and those are scathing. "Do we have to make a listing for everything?", they ask, missing the point of a database, but okay I guess. "This is not a game", "there's nothing here", "pointless". You can argue they are correct, I won't stop you, but one thing I noticed was a thin film of rage clinging to those reviews. You cannot read them without feeling that this was taken as a genuine affront to the arts, as a borderline sacrilege, a piece of trash placed upon the shining altar of the goddess of Interactive Fiction. IF is serious business! The only positive review comes from 2023 and engages with TMG in a way people would engage with Uninteractive Fiction a year later.

From this place, I started to wonder: was The Minimalist Game simply a victim of being made and published at the wrong time? Would it attract less rage if we've seen it appear a decade and a half later? I'm not saying it'd be rated higher, but I believe it would be received with more warmth and affection. Perhaps this would be what we would reference instead of Uninteractive Fiction while joking. And from here, I asked myself another question: how many games were met with unjustified anger just because they were made too early? How many games published now are overlooked or considered bad just because we're not ready for them yet? How many games are hidden, waiting to be rediscovered in a much friendlier future? Will their authors ever know the future is kinder?

We are constantly enjoying things which used to be considered terrible. Archeologists unearth and cherish what the ancients thought of as trash. Kids on Tik-Tok rediscover old/niche songs which were considered too strange or improper for the times they were released in. The Minimalist Game is, for me, yet another instance of the same, ages-old phenomenon. Is it good? Well, not really, but the times have changed. People of 2010s weren't ready for it but we, people of 2020s, are. Welcome home, The Minimalist Game. Welcome home.

I remember being a teenager and bearing witness to the strange psychological war inflicted on art kids like me. In it, we were told that our sensitivity amounts to nothing and that the future belongs to code, which is in itself a cold, uncaring, and most importantly, lucrative thing. Coding and computer science were put in a strange position opposite of poetry and literature at large. Poetry is this nebulous thing while code does always precisely what it's asked for, so coders have sharp minds and laser focus while poets simply think all day about some abstract concepts nobody cares about. The mere existence of Cicatrix, of course, makes this dichotomy crumble and turn to dust.

I don't want to talk about the story itself because I think this is something that needs to be experienced on individual basis and I'm not entirely sure how to even begin to summarize. What I can say is things on the technical side. I feel like you can read it without knowing Inform but knowing even a little bit of it (like me) will probably make the experience way richer. I absolutely love the contrast of short, matter-of-fact Inform sentences with the emotional depth of what's happening — the code is the mask for the story, in a way. There's such a wonderful rhythm in the definitions, in the "instead of... say..."s, in the strings of "understand X as...", in the "now"s, in "if... otherwise..."s.

The first time I read it, I stared at the last sentence for a while, and then I reread the whole thing. I reread it whenever I get reminded of it. It's probably one of my favorite poems ever. I'm not entirely sure if I can ever properly word why that's a thing. At least I tried.

After all this time, I can finally say something about this game. This might be less about the plot and more an unorganized personal talk because, in case you can’t tell by the location I set on this site, I am Polish, born and raised, so this one hits particularly close home, pun perhaps intended.

Growing up in Poland, you can’t help but get tangled in history, whether you like it or not. My Warsaw friends grew up seeing all the plaques about Warsaw Uprising and World War II scattered about the city. I, growing up in the countryside, listened to tales of my grandmother, telling me about the troubles with Nazi soldiers coming to nearby villages, and to tales of my parents who grew up in the turbulent times of economical transformations. I saw my father’s old Russian dictionary, I saw farming machines with Cyrillic writing on them. It wasn’t that long ago since the country had to come out and rebuild itself from ashes of war and it was even less time since first (partially) free elections – to put it into perspective, they were 36 years ago and I’m 25.

There’s a lot of say about the way Polish people still bear the scars of past wars, transformations, and uncertainties, even if they were born long after the time they were over. Ever since I was a little child, I was bombarded with tales of heroism of child soldiers and hardships that people had to endure before me, tying my Polish identity to glorious struggle and suffering. Growing up in the countryside, I was also exposed to some joys of Polish folklore, which somewhat balanced my perception of what it means to be Polish and didn’t create an image of eternal pain and ruin, but my city friends didn’t get the same treatment.

Why am I telling you all of this? It’s because this need for glorifying suffering and leveraging it against others runs very deep in the way Polish history is treated, and it certainly makes its way into the historical genre of works. It’s one of the reasons why I simply can’t read it most of the time. I know we suffered because it’s written in every inch of the dirt I walk on, in the very flag that I keep on the display in my room at all times: white and red, with red being the symbol of bravery and blood spilled in all the struggles that we had to endure. There tends to be a lot of pathos and moralization involved in historical fiction (and non-fiction) that I just can’t handle anymore and I was afraid that Thousand Lives might be one of those works that I’ll have to just power through. Fortunately, I was wrong.

The premise of Thousand Lives is simple: you are a woman, living in the incredibly uncertain times of a variety of Polish transformations. You take this woman through decades of her life in a series of six short e-mails, sent daily, ending always with a binary choice which shifts the events. Things are written in a very matter-of-fact tone: this happens. Then this happens. It feels like reading someone’s life summary from the perspective of an objective observer. The choices themselves, for me at least, weren’t always easy, and I can’t help but wonder if this is because I have the necessary cultural context to fully grasp how hard they truly were. This isn’t to discredit any non-Polish readers, of course, but when you grew up listening to people talk about all of this, when you know the actual moral and social weight of those choices, it feels more real. This could’ve easily been a story of any other lady I once passed by on the street. I tried my best to go on the “revolutionary” path, imagining my character to be one of the more hopeful people in the times of terrible transformations, and I ended up going on a pretty revolutionary/radical path, taking that “high ground” where truth and freedom were supposed to prevail, but I still “broke” and buried the story that could incriminate my brother. I can’t even tell you why. It’s just a story, after all, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even then, I didn’t feel judged by the text for my choices: they simply summarized what happened, and I can’t be more grateful for it. There is recognition in it: times were hard and everyone did what they could to survive.

Every day, I waited for another e-mail to come, sometimes sitting and refreshing my inbox when time came for it. With the real historical postage stamps attached, it felt like getting a post card with pieces of the story on them, and it does a lot to create a certain kind of atmosphere. In every e-mail, the footer says clearly that it’s all in memory of Bogumiła Borowicz, who was, as the site for the game says, a genocide survivor, one of the first female engineers in post-war Poland, an activist, and the most fun grandma anyone could ever ask for. For me, it's pretty obvious that Thousand Lives wasn’t meant to be yet another historical Polish project of the “we suffered sooo much and that’s why we’re great” variety. It’s a project made out of passion and love, acknowledging the complicated nature of the mess that Poland was (I mean, it still is, but y’know, a bit less). I don’t know which paths that I chose were inspired by Bogumiła Borowicz’s own life – there could be an overlap – but there was authenticity in what I read. I’m not going to go for another round of playing as I think that the purpose is to live your life once, then never again, but if I didn’t think that, I’d check other possibilities.

Maybe my opinion is biased due to my own life and upbringing but frankly, I don’t necessarily care in this case. This might be one of the only historical Polish works which I actually enjoyed reading, so of course I’ll recommend it. And if you’ll excuse my Polish: dziękuję panu, panie Borowicz, to była naprawdę piękna rzecz.

Another game with which one of my works shares a jam (this time, Amare Fest 2025), which is really amazing. The main jam it was submitted to was the Queer Vampire Jam, though, and that made it even more awesome because… well. Queer vampires, good gods, do I have to tell you why it’s cool?

I’m already familiar with some of the author’s work (specifically, No More and How Dare You) and I know that eir stuff tends to hit pretty well when it comes to the emotional layer of things. Blood and Sunlight is a part of the series that I’m yet to get into but it can absolutely be played as a standalone game, which is how I experienced it. It’s New Year’s Eve. You’re Zach, a vampire. You just spent the night having fun with your partner, Lyle, their sister Daphne, and their two cousins. Things are all nice, except… well, you can’t be in the sunlight, and if you stay the night, that’s what you’ll encounter. So, will you stay with your beloved and risk getting violently sick in the morning or will you leave and feel the crushing weight of what-ifs?

There’s a lot of discussions about vampires in popculture and the whole thing with vampire romance, and this discourse’s been going on probably as long as (I’m sorry for the comparison but I need to) Twilight has been around, if not earlier. I talked to many people who are drawn to vampires and everyone had their own little bits and pieces of canon they thought were the best, and they all had different ideas of what vampires represent or are meant to represent. There’s many “flavors” of vampires around and I’m always happy to see another reinterpretation, no matter what it might be… but also, I’m a little biased towards vampires being “the other” – alienated from human society in one way or another, mentally and/or physically. I feel like Blood and Sunlight's flavor of vampire focuses on this aspect in particular. Zach experiences (if you choose so) some angsty feelings over the fact that his nature doesn’t allow him to fully enjoy the night. Suffering waits for him no matter what his choice is. It’s either suffering on the physical level or suffering on mental level. Wouldn’t it all be better if he was “normal” – if Lyle had a “normal” partner?

Usually, the angst of human-vampire relationship comes from violent vampiric urges, from nature that can’t be changed, from eternal hunger. We all read that scene before: “go away, I’m going to hurt you!” and “nooo, you won’t hurt me, you love me”, and “I can’t control myself”, and blah blah blah. In this universe, however, it seems like being a vampire is more like having a chronic illness that’s being kept under control under extremely specific circumstances. Now, I haven’t read through other Blood and... games… yet (I will) but if a game can be read as a standalone, I feel like I can work with what I’ve read. I’ve had days during which seeing sunlight made me nauseous and only sitting in the dark room could restore me to normal, I’ve had days during which the very thought of food made me want to throw up. And there is a certain dose of guilt that comes with enduring pain, that creeping thought that perhaps your loved ones would do better without you “ruining their fun”, or that they would be better if they didn’t have to accommodate your requests that you make only to stay vaguely functional. There’s something to be said about the option to walk right into the sunlight, even if you know it’ll hurt you. It’s the longing for the “regular” life that truly hit me on the emotional level, quite authentic if you’ve ever dealt with a condition that renders you unable to do certain things.

There’s a lot of angst but also a lot of softness in Blood and Sunlight, Lyle is an understanding partner, one that certainly cares about Zach’s well-being – sure, they were the one who requested Zach to stay, but they did so in the alcoholic haze, probably motivated by deep feelings, and I can understand it. In the morning, they’re apologetic about it and offer to help as much as they can, including offering their own blood. There’s a lot to say about the theme of blood drinking, with blood being the common shorthand for life, so I always eat up consensual blood drinking as a theme – sharing a part of your life with someone else, trusting them deeply enough to not kill you outright. There’s so much trust that this act requires and it feels like there’s so much trust between Zach and Lyle, so much love that maybe can’t stop the sunlight from hurting but can make staying in it more bearable.

In case you can’t tell from this whole review, I really enjoyed this one. Good gods, I was definitely in need of something softer today. I will definitely check out the remaining two games in the series soon. Go and check it out for yourself.

I think there’s something incredibly fascinating about places which are abandoned. There were people once, living, breathing people like me and you, and suddenly, the air stays still, the rooms are silent, and everything is falling into disrepair. You know, weight of history and all, maybe twisted sense of nostalgia, maybe awe in the face of decay that will, one day, get us too – there’s just something about it. So I was definitely curious about how Habeas Corpus will tackle it.

It’s another word-limited work, this time with a limit of 1000 words, which is definitely more forgiving than 500. We play as someone with no memory, waking up in an abandoned moving fortress. From here, there are two endings: the Lotus-Eater ending in which we end up falling into forever sleep (neat reference, by the way), and Firmament ending, in which we end up escaping together with another fortress resident, a harpy.

Again about the visuals: I feel like this particular author never misses with those. The striped background reminds me of scan lines – with the pixelated font, it brings to mind an old monitor and that adds a little layer of strange nostalgia to the mix. I don’t know how to explain it but those visual choices simply make choice to me.

We wake up with no memory – only a rough feeling that we belong where we are. All is still within but moving outside. There’s rust and broken things all around. Maybe this reflection is yours, maybe it’s not. It’s strange to explore this place and try to piece together its purpose, and maybe our purpose. I’m still thinking of how to put all of this together. Perhaps it says something about imprisonment. Habeas corpus is the whole procedure that is used to determine if someone’s detention is lawful (if I understood things correctly. I’m not a lawyer). The fortress is powered up by a phoenix-like harpy, and weren’t harpies the creatures which snatched people away and put them before Erinyes, punishers of crime? The harpy is imprisoned itself, voicebox torn out, and there’s something so powerful in this imagery. It has no say in anything, made into a power source for a decaying building – a fortress made for war, judging by the armory. When we bring the voice back to the harpy, are we proving our innocence or are we atoning for what we’ve done in the past?

And when it comes to the dream ending, weren’t lotus eaters imprisoned in their own company? Didn’t they live a dream of absolute apathy, forgetting everything about themselves? The one ending where the fortress keeps on going, the ending in which we’re meant to stay imprisoned forever, is the one in which we choose to give up and give into nothingness, and…

Yeah, in case you can’t see, Habeas Corpus gave me a lot to think about. It probably won’t surprise you to say that I enjoyed it a lot. It just happened to hit some of the points that get my brain going in just the right way. So, maybe go ahead and experience it for yourself, if you want to see what I’m talking about.

One of the several games on the list from a jam I happened to take part in – this time, it’s Neo-Twiny 2024. I didn’t play this one back when it released, probably because there’s been 141 entries total, 138 if you don’t count my own. That’s a whole lot of games so some of them just didn’t come into my field of vision, which is why I was happy to see Heaven Alive as the next entry. I might never be able to read every single Neo-Twiny 2024 entry but I’m glad I get a chance to experience one of them now.

Heaven Alive abides by the “500 words maximum” rule with the total wordcount of 498 so it was a fairly quick read. There are two sides in this story – The Executor (who is, according to the description, “a space-faring warlord”) and The Wretched (“his visier”). While “visier” sort of implies an advisory position, it becomes very clear that The Executor probably wants advice only if it aligns with what he wants.

Briefly about the visuals. For me, they’re definitely the highlight of the entire experience. Absolutely gorgeous styling that definitely evokes the sci-fi vibe the game is meant to have. The bar code motif, coupled with the fact that The Wretched, which we play as, is implanted with some sort of a device, kind of makes my skin crawl. Is The Wretched disposable? Are we just one of many, lined up to serve?

Due to the wordcount limit, the conversations are quite short and in some cases, that makes things feel a bit sudden. Then again, we are dealing with a space warlord who will torture you for disrespect, so perhaps the suddenness is appropriate. Anger and violence can be lightning quick, after all. There is no good ending here, really: if you end up defying him, he’ll torture you. If you end up bowing down to him, you’ll still lead a life of pain from the device (a transmitter of some sort, clearly an instrument of punishment) implanted within you. How long can you keep The Executor satisfied? How much longer will the torture last?

In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure what to think about it. I can’t say with clear conscience that I “had fun” or “enjoyed it” but also I can’t say that it was a bad game. The visuals are beautiful, the prose is neat, it’s all executed really well. Guess it’s just another one of those things that simply didn’t hit for me specifically and this is completely fine because the world doesn’t revolve around me. Try it out for yourself and see if it’s for you.

Listen, I appeared in the interactive fiction community a year or so ago, straight out of visual novel community, therefore, I’m used to creating and playing choice-based games. I’m still getting used to parsers and trying to destigmatize them in my head, where they’re still clinging to the association of hours-long, puzzle-filled ordeals (don’t come after me, I’m trying to make a parser myself!). That’s why I was actually kind of happy to see return to home, which advertises itself as a “little IF romp”. Also, today I learned what “romp” means.

I have Lectrote installed but it wouldn’t run the game so I installed Gargoyle as instructed and everything worked as it should. I’ve never heard of GAGS or even Gargoyle for that matter so I’m glad I got to learn. I’m aware that it’s customary to attach transcripts of your parser playthroughs alongside your reviews (on IntFiction forum, where this review was first published) but truth be told, not only I don’t know how to do transcripts with Gargoyle, I also absolutely forgor that I should probably record the playthrough. I’m sorry, it will most likely happen again.

The premise is pretty simple: you’re on your way home but your usual route is blocked. You decide to leave your car by the blockade and just walk to your house instead. Along the way, you can decide to take random detours, take in the views, and encounter a variety of objects you can take with you. Short, neat, very slice of life.

I visited 13/14 locations and gathered 3/4 objects you can find, which translates to 13/14 points. The greatest difficulty I had with this game was trying to enter the house because I simply don’t know how directions work. There’s not a lot I can say because it very much has a vibe of a test project – something you make just to test out a way to make a game, and if I understand correctly, that was essentially what it was meant to be. I’m kind of sad that I couldn’t, for example, examine the house or the car, but that’s understandable within a “test game” scope, I suppose. I won’t comment on the language because the author requested so (European English-As-Foreign-Language solidarity?) but I didn’t have trouble understanding what’s going on, which is great.

Overall, the game has a very calm atmosphere. There’s just something nice about “walking simulators” where your only task is to walk and maybe go on little detours. You know, you need to switch up things from time to time, break the routine, go on a different path. Variety is the spice of life. Did I enjoy playing through it? I actually did. Might even go on a walk today.

Just for the sake of transparency: I only played the demo version of the game, so I’m voicing my opinions about the demo version of the game and not the full one. Keep that in mind while you read. The review may contain untagged spoilers.

Good gods, I miss my TTRPG sessions. That’s why I was kind of intrigued when it comes to The Sword of Voldiir, which is based on a homebrew DnD campaign. It’s got all that you need: character creation, stat rolling, turn-based combat. I love turn-based combat.

Character creation is rather simple: your race (out of three options, which are human, half-elf, and siren; each with their own strengths and stat bonuses), your gender and pronouns, your weapons, your stats (which can be either rolled or chosen manually; I opted for rolling and managed to get really decent numbers), and your sexuality (one of the companions will shift their gender according to your preference). “Visual” customization comes later in the story, which I’m completely fine with.

The game focuses on the band of four mercenaries: Lorelei of Running Waters (a siren woman), Aenwyn Rolen (who in my playthrough happened to be a half-elf man, as I exercised my bisexual right to not choose a preference), Cassian Winterluff (a human man), and of course, the main character (in this case, half-elf nonbinary disaster, Aaran Alvierni). You are all tasked with retrieving the titular Sword of Voldiir, which has great magical capabilities… or maybe anti-magical capabilities, as it seems it’s most prominent feature is magic immunity. The sword rests in a cave, you go to the cave, retrieve the sword, and… get robbed immediately the moment you leave. Absolutely classic hook: your MacGuffin gets stolen, you have to get it back or else bad things will happen.

Along the way you pass various checks and talk to your companions to raise your relationship (and flirtation, if you want to) points. The demo also contains two combat encounters: one with the bandit who stole the sword, one with a chimera which guards the sword at a rich nobleman’s house. During combat encounters you can choose between using magic and using your weapon that you’ve chosen earlier – unfortunately, you can’t switch back and forth between weapons and magic during one combat and you get locked into using one or the other but you can choose between three spells if you’re stuck with magic, so I guess at least that. Don’t be scared of failing a combat encounter, you can reset the encounter if you end up being unlucky… like me. Oops. There’s not a lot of strategy in those encounters, unless you end up using spells which sometimes deal AOE damage instead of single target damage. I don’t mind it at all because my strategy is usually “the enemy can’t kill you if you kill them first” anyway.

Before I go into the “general enjoyment” section, I need to mention some unfortunate technical things. There was a section in which the <<if>> statement broke. In another, Aenwyn’s pronouns weren’t rendered as they should be (showing only $ahimself). I’m willing to look the other way when that happens, especially if I can just continue playing regardless. The game clearly didn’t break in those passages so I simply continued and it didn’t impact a lot to me. What did impact my gameplay were the color schemes used for the game. I played it entirely in dark mode (as I tend to do) and contrast between certain colors, especially the dark background and red links, makes them hard to read. The red works great for light mode but I don’t use light mode, so, yeah.

To come back to the story: I will be honest with you, it’s not the type of story I enjoy… and that’s completely okay. If the game’s goal was to emulate a feeling of sitting by the DnD table as the Dungeon Master gives you short and quick descriptions of things, it definitely succeeded. It’s not what I want to read in my IF but if all you’re searching for is good old “You’re in a cave. There are three paths ahead of you. What do you do?”, it might just be for you. So, important question: did I have fun? Not really. But you might and I think that’s awesome.

(I'm sorry, I had to make a Persona reference in the title. I will do it again.)

First of all, thank you to Ave Q Production for being generous enough to leave some community copies for people like me to grab. There is a demo available but I'd rather experience things in their fullest version.

I won't tag spoilers for a variety of reasons but I am warning that there are spoilers in this review, so read further at your own risk.

We’ve seen this premise many times before: a new, ultraimmersive game is made, you plug your brain into it, things start to happen – not necessarily good things at that. I’m usually not that eager to check those out because in the end, they tend to be a very similar flavor of “Escapism is bad and should be punishable with death” or “Did you know that giving your whole body and mind to a corporation is bad?”. You have masses that yearn to feel good for once in a terrible world and, y’know, end up being guinea pigs that get mercilessly slaughtered for that.

The Butterfly Dreams gives us a slightly different approach: it’s all just a test session where experts of various fields are told to just go wild with their imagination and do whatever they want. The chosen ones include Renata (older lady who’s a beloved children’s author), Juan (a neurosurgeon who’s kinda anxious about the technology), Helena (a world-class chef), Aaron (an economy-changing banker with what’s clearly untreated anxiety and impostor syndrome), Layna (a child programming prodigy), Sean (a professional, gods forgive me for saying this, gamer), and of course, the main character, Thomas (or Tom), who’s not really specified to be anything at the beginning of the game. Our task is to make up new worlds and let everyone else test them out.

Before I get into the story and plot themselves, I need to talk about the visuals – it is a visual novel, after all. I think there was definitely a lot of care put into how the game is presented. There’s a lot of sprite and camera movement that I find, honestly, quite damn cool. The sprites themselves give a pretty good idea of who the characters might be before you even get to know them, which is obviously good, and while the backgrounds are sometimes more symbolic (for example, just two cups of coffee on the table instead of the cottage you’re in), they’re still pretty fitting. There are some really interesting details that you might miss (text and textbox slightly glitching in certain situations, butterfly “click-to-continue” and butterfly appearing when you click), and I really respect everyone who comes up with stuff like this, it’s small but it adds a lot. I also appreciate the accessibility options, especially the one where you can enable descriptions of sound, as I always take this one since my audio processing can sometimes go out of the window whenever I’m focusing on the text. I do have an issue with the fact that sometimes, the descriptions aren’t exactly informative but rather seem like an extension of the text itself (like “SFX: Music to my ears” when a scream plays. Great for me, someone who can hear that scream, terrible for someone who can’t).

Alrighty, into the game itself. We’re all in the “humble abode” (literal mansion) of Brian Singh, who’s the CEO of Asynthesis, the company behind Fantasia – the machine we’ve been chosen to test. Everyone has their own reasons to be here, from creating perfect adaptations of their works (Renata), through wanting to check how far technology progressed (Juan), to simply not willing to pay the fee that needs to be paid when you’re leaving the testing early (Aaron). Every now and then, we’re shoved into the testing chambers to check out whatever world the creator made up, with the creator’s identity usually kept secret until the transfer’s complete. It is quite an interesting concept – you have all those people who come from different backgrounds, have different kind of expertise, want different things out of the experience. Some dynamics start to form: Layna naturally clings to grandmotherly Renata, anxious Aaron nods along to anything Juan might say.

I can’t deny, I got a little attached to the characters in a way. They have their distinct ways of speaking and their personalities are definitely showing. This is why it pains me to say that I don’t think we’ve spent enough time with them. I’m not saying it because I’d love to see more of them (though I would) but rather because some things remain somewhat undercooked for my taste. We get brief descriptions of how we’re all spending time together but I’d rather see it play out on the screen. I loved the one-on-one talks we had at the very beginning of the game and I’d definitely love to see more of that, even if just to cement some bonds and explore some dynamics.

And this, honestly, is my biggest problem with this game: not enough time. The description says that it’s a psychological mystery novel but the most difficult thing about both psychological and mystery works is that they both require a build up which can take a lot of time. I feel like we didn’t get enough of it. We didn’t spend enough time with the characters and we didn’t spend enough time in the worlds created by them, we didn’t spend enough time on feelings and the state of everyone’s psyche, even after Juan seemingly triggered a Torment Nexus scenario. I didn’t feel the “mystery” part – it probably refers to the twist, in which it turns out that Tom, the MC, is a vile criminal mastermind, but… it didn’t feel earned to me, and neither did the revelation that it’s all been an Nth layer of simulation all along. Comments on Itch point out that there are hints that might be lost if you “fail perception checks” and maybe this is why I didn’t feel like it makes any sense, maybe I just failed the perception checks. I tend to write my reviews after just one playthrough, unless it’s clear that the game is meant to be replayed, so perhaps other choices show some more hints as to that and it’s all on me. I’m not infallible.

To summarize: I think the concept is pretty great, I liked the characters, the visuals are definitely a BIG highlight of it all. I just wish we could’ve spent more time getting into everyone’s heads and building everything up.

In the end, there’s only one question that matters: did I have fun reading through it? Yes. Yes, I actually did. So, you know. Maybe give it a try yourself if you feel like it.