Ratings and Reviews by DemonApologist

I decided to play this game because the author, Chandler Groover, mentioned in the postmortem for The Bat that “Few people seemed to identify ‘consumerism’ as a theme in Eat Me, even though I felt like I was screaming through a megaphone.” That got me curious about it. (It also biased my playthrough to look for this theme. How dreadful for me to have to consume consciously.)

Eat Me is a parser game where you play as a child who has apparently entered into a Faustian bargain with the narrator to be able to eat endlessly. The experience of eating your way through the mysterious fairy tale castle and its succulent inhabitants is a vivid nightmare of consumption, seamlessly intertwining the pleasure and horror of amoral gluttony.

The only source of gameplay friction I encountered—other than my own emotional reactions to the imagery in the writing—involved navigation woes. During about 35 minutes of my 1h55m playthrough, I was stuck, knowing conceptually how to solve several puzzles but unable to find components for those puzzles. For instance, I had discovered a use for the crow, but it had long since departed the map to feast elsewhere. Using the “think” command was not helpful whatsoever, as it only pointed me to solutions I had already become aware of. (Like, yes, I know that I need soil, but there isn’t any!) Because of how otherwise fluid and seamless the gameplay was, I was reluctant to look up the answers as the game had assured me many times that it was impossible to get soft-locked.

When I finally caved and looked at the map, I was aghast at my persistent mistake. It turns out, my mental image of a “pantry” as a space that has only one entrance (like a closet) was stubborn enough to fully override the room description that I had been shown five times, and I never once noticed it had a west exit. As the player, ultimately, it is my responsibility to manage navigation and see all the exits from the room. I do get that! But nevertheless, since I failed to do so, the in-game hint system was unable to account for this and only irritated me by giving me a set of information that was orthogonal to the problem I was having. It makes me wonder, as a minor game design note for the future, if it is possible for the game to have noticed that I had never entered rooms that I had access to, and prioritize that as a hint when “think”-ing.

Anyway, enough on that. Here’s what I really wanted to discuss. (Oh, and just bear in mind, from this point onward, spoilers abound. It’s hard to talk about something like this game while inhibited by spoiler tags. If you have yet to play and are not sufficiently deterred by the content warnings, this game does have my recommendation.)

One of the things I’ve been pondering after finishing this game, perhaps strangely, is the relationship between the architecture of the castle and the grotesque fluidity of the carnage within. Eat Me is inescapably organic in its environment: lard oozes; candles drip; rinds give way to soft cheese that splats; sardines slip as they are slurped. I’m sure you get what I mean. Meanwhile, the castle stands, rigid and inedible and inflexible with its cardinal directions, order imposed onto this seething ouroboros of growth, rot, s**t, and death.

At least, at first. Over the course of the, well, courses, the castle hollows, sogs, and crumbles, picked clean like the ribs forming the chandelier. The perverse fluidity of milk and soup fissure through the order of the castle, eventually leaving behind little more than a spine-shaped hallway from the drawbridge to the chapel, the castle a carcass. By consuming the story and its attendant puzzles, the reader carves through it—due to the nonlinearity of the puzzle order—following the path of least resistance as they eat. The motion of narrative consumption mimics what is happening to the castle, and on a smaller scale what happens each time the protagonist eats something.

Returning to architecture, the other element I wanted to discuss is the verticality of the game, and specifically, the emphasis on descent as the primary motion of progress. As I played—if you can stomach forgiving my less-than-normatively-literary references—I kept thinking about the location “Ancient Cistern” from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This location presents itself in two parts: an opulent, gilded layer on top, serene and beautiful; which then reveals a hellish, dark, rotting cavern beneath. Mechanically, you are meant to traverse the two halves, which are ultimately inseparable. You cannot have the paradise of wealth without the dismal horror beneath.

Eat Me’s castle is not as neatly partitioned, but there is still a distinct difference between above and below. The moat is full of “nightsoil” (which the game taught me is a euphemism for “s**t”). The dungeon is full of mold, torture devices, and corpses, that will never disappear. The corpses in particular are persistent; in my desperation to get the crow back after it flew away, I made a point of trying to eat all of them hoping to perhaps become just disgusting enough to tempt its return. (Cursed, I know, but it’s a cursed game. It’s hard to say if that’s even the worst thing that the player can eat.) These “low” locations contain what is required to support the Baron’s (and other denizens’) lavish lifestyle. The filth cannot be scrubbed clean; you are required to descend into it again and again.

Consider the stark difference between ascent and descent. Upward motion involves climbing completely banal staircases (with the exception being, perhaps, the chandelier, though that is quite a temporary ascension). Downward motion is comparatively dramatic: dragging a guard through a grate into a vat of sour milk; a guard falling through into the nightsoil-moat; a torrent of soup dragging you down into the undercroft; a torrent of cream dragging you down into the moat; pouncing down onto an anthropomorphic salad named Jenny from above; descending the stairs to witness the torture behind the godly visage of the cow; and perhaps most significantly, descending in digestion through the Baron’s four stomachs that unravel his psyche as you go, witnessing the carnage that it took to sustain him and his castle. I can’t help but be reminded of the children’s game Chutes and Ladders, where “orderly” actions take you up the rigid ladders, and “sinful/antisocial” actions send you down the sinuous slides.

Eat Me is a plane of Hell devoted to gluttony, tormenting you with endless want and the grisly stakes of that want, sending you downward again and again, and at long last (in one ending at least) burning you in an infernal oven to be feasted upon by an audience of fey onlookers, as if Hansel and Gretel were a Black Mirror bacchanal.

This game is a beautiful and terrible thing, both sensuous and senseless. Its horrors bite back.

In Paranoia, the devilish Dr. Iblis has tasked you, the player, with exploring a series of copies of the same room. Your job is to determine whether each version is identical to the original room, or if an anomaly is present. If you do this successfully 13 times in a row, you reach the end of the game. If you make a mistake, the counter resets.

I ended up playing the game three times, making one mistake out of the 44 or so rooms that I encountered (the mistake was on my first playthrough, which I’m guessing was an absent object that I didn’t notice the omission of due to carelessness).

You might wonder, based on the premise, why I found the game interesting enough to play that much. The answer, really, is that it’s surprisingly addictive. In my first playthrough, I encountered a wacky meta room that was so compelling that it made me lean forward and get invested in just how weird the anomalies would get. That’s why I ended up playing the game multiple times—a craving for the potential for novel, odd experiences in this room. Unfortunately, that ended up being by far the weirdest version of the room that I encountered, but many of the anomalies were still fun to encounter.

The main reason I decided to write a review for this game is to discuss an aspect of the gameplay experience that I found interesting. The moment you notice any difference, there is no gameplay reason to continue exploring the room and you can proceed by pressing the green button. Many of these are instant solves based on an obvious difference in the room description, meaning that you might spend as little as 10 seconds in the anomaly rooms. Despite this, I did find myself lingering a bit to experience the weirdness. For instance, if you are greeted with an off smell, there is no strategic reason to trace its source, but I always did just for the novelty of the description. Overall, though, this game mechanic creates a significant disparity; the vast majority of time spent playing this game will be spent exploring the identical, uninteresting version of the room.

This has three specific effects that I want to discuss.

(1) Learning the room. Because so much time is spent in the original version of the room, this has the important function of reinforcing the player’s memory of the space. I read the same sentences so many times that the differences stood out instantly when they appeared. I think this is an important gameplay function, because if you (for instance) didn’t thoroughly inspect the first version of the room, you’d be at the mercy of the anomalies in the future if you didn’t have subsequent chances to learn what was in the normal version of the room.

(2) Generating the titular paranoia. Each time you are faced with a normal room, you approach a kind of emotional tipping point where you have to decide whether it is worth wasting more time looking at the normal version of the room, or commit to the idea that you are in a normal room and risk pressing the red button. At some point, the tipping point is reached, and you press it. But just prior to the tipping point, you are still feeling paranoid. Is there something I forgot to taste? Did I remember to check the panel buttons to see which one was on the left? And so forth. The paranoia grows more intense as the counter gets closer to 13, because failure means redoing what feels like a lot of progress. In that sense, this disparity in gameplay is essential to fostering the atmosphere the game evokes.

(3) Creating a sense of disappointment. The reason I was so addicted to replaying this game was because I wanted to see the bizarre ways in which the room might have changed. This means that, the longer spent in a normal version of the room, the more disappointed I started to feel. Essentially, “That’s too bad, I’m not going to get to see anything weird this time.” So in an interesting way, the structure of the game intensified a craving for novelty, and a concomitant sense of disappointment at the resigned realization that tasting the vase will not result in a deranged experience this time.

This all is thematically engaging to me. The game has understated sinister elements—the suspicious name “Iblis,” thirteen being the number of success, the strange experience of what happens when you press the button and the room resets, and the eerier or more disruptive anomalies—that make an outwardly normal room feel liminal and disconcerting. But the main thing that I think is important is how it is immersive into the role of a test subject. I learned to suppress the part of my brain that claims (incorrectly, apparently) that I don’t have any interest in tasting a painting, and it became a routine activity that I stopped questioning. I kept playing more than I was required to because the game runs on a variable-interval schedule where you could, at any time, receive the reward of something new and exciting. The game used cheap but powerful psychological tactics to train me to continue playing, and because of the lab-experiment theming, also made me first passively and then actively aware that I was succumbing to that temptation, which I think is fascinating.

I was torn between a 4- and 5-star rating for this game (it’s a true 4.5). As thought-provoking and addictive as it is, I decided on the lower side because the game most frequently simulates repetition and disappointment, so I’m finding it hard to weigh the fleeting moments of wonder and excitement at finding an anomaly as overwhelmingly favorable enough to offset that experience.

Ultimately, it’s very well crafted and the self-contained environment is just detailed enough to be interesting to explore without becoming overwhelming. As a result, I give this game a strong recommendation for anyone who thinks the premise sounds appealing at all.

I decided to use the “10 Random Games” option on IFDB and received this as one of the results. I felt mildly obligated to write about it for posterity, so here’s the review.

Time Trip is a short (20 minutes or so) parser game where you play as a person who has been involuntarily selected to test a time machine for the government. What follows is a series of time travel vignettes, with the player encountering different obstacles to get back to their original timeline. Each vignette has a small amount of navigation and/or a light puzzle attached to it.

The game offers the following advice: “Don't be too literal. Yes, you would normally ‘push’ a button, but don't be afraid to ‘use’ a button.” You should definitely follow that advice; treating this game with “use” as the default verb (along with “take” and “examine”) will get you through pretty much everything. The game indicates which nouns you can interact with as hyperlinks, and clicking on those will tell you the language you need to use with them if you get stuck. However, if you are looking to this game for a particularly challenging puzzle experience, you would live to regret those expectations.

So, if the puzzles aren’t that involved, what else is there?

The game bills itself as a comedy, so I feel like it’s fair enough to evaluate the game’s use of humor. I’d say that there are a few funny moments that I don’t want to spoil—light meta jokes or misunderstandings about what period in history you arrived at—that I found enjoyable. However, this game about time travel is fittingly enough, dated. One of the first jokes in the entire game is that the player character has lost their memory due to, among other things, “exposure to [the] ‘Twilight’ audiobook.” If that’s not the most 2012 joke that you’ve heard today, it’s almost certainly only because you read the title of this review before getting this far. Twilight has gone through entire discourse cycles since then, try to keep up!

In terms of craft, a note that I want to highlight here is the vignette structure I mentioned earlier. I think this structure is a good model for a small-scale parser game, where each puzzle is in a self-contained environment that you exit upon completion. The time travel element also provides opportunities for some (bite-sized) interesting settings. If I were going to develop a small scale parser game, I would look to this chain of self-contained scenelets as a reasonable starting point.

If you have 20 minutes to kill between bouts of existential dread, and feel malevolently compelled to spend those minutes in 2012, you could do worse than playing Time Trip.

For my first IFDB review, it seems appropriate that I should respond to one of the rare pieces of fiction that has been written specifically for a reader like me.

By that I mean, Idle Hands recognizes the kind of androgynous/masculine allure inherent to the cultural figure of the devil, without conflating interest in that as necessarily also a desire for non-consent or torture. The writing style here is sexually explicit, as advertised, but also feels cozy and wholesome without fully abandoning the vague undercurrent of threat that is essential in drawing one toward something marked as “evil” in the first place.

The main dynamic element of the piece is a series of “hover-reveal” links. When you hover over these, new text is revealed, which vanishes again if you move the cursor off of the link. The “reveal” aspect of the link mirrors what is happening in the scene. For instance, the devil makes a show of removing his glove for you, such that the reveal of more text precisely mimics the reveal of a hand. The hover aspect also implicates the reader in this intimacy by making touch (of the cursor) the way to reveal the more intense/romantic details that in-universe would be accomplished through actual physical contact. By hovering over the links, the reader moves closer to the devil in a tactile sense, and pulling away loses sight of those same details. It makes those furtive moments more precious. You cannot hold onto more than one of them at a time. You cannot have everything at once. But, you are nonetheless invited to partake at different sites for these ephemeral moments of connection. The devil understands his power, clearly, in providing satisfaction that is by its nature temporary.

Idle Hands was submitted to the “Neo-Twiny Jam” (2023) which has the requirement that the story be written in 500 or fewer words. This has some significant implications that are relevant thematically to the work. I first thought about how disappointing it is that the scope is not greater—I would love to go on a grander adventure in exploring the world of this text. Finally, a work that gets me! How is there so little of it?

But thinking about it more, because this is a piece about the experience of craving, the impact of the piece would probably be lessened if there was a lot more of it. That is, I suppose, the genius of adhering to something like a 500-word limit, no matter how frustrating I find flash fiction. Thinking about a creep in scope, the more that specificity of the point-of-view character would be allowed to develop, the more chances for a reader to become unbound from that character realizing it was “someone else” and not really them. While ordinarily I prefer when works are about someone specific as the point-of-view character, here it works greatly to the advantage of the immersion of the piece to avoid that.

There is a focus on precision of language that would be much more difficult to sustain over a longer work. I enjoyed the writing style, which retains the clarity and approachability of prose while infusing a poetic level of attention to detail, a balance that I found effective. Similarly, the UI is polished, a cozy box that really emphasizes intimate attention between the reader and the devil, with each of those under 500 words gaining so much importance because of that attention. I felt welcomed into a space where I could focus on what is truly important in life: thirsting for the devil.

My advice to potential readers would be: pay attention to the content warnings. My guess is, you probably already know whether or not you want to read sexually explicit content about the devil!

If you don’t, stick to your virtues.

And if you do? Subsume.