Reviews by Stian

Capturing some of the same eeriness as Alien (the film), The Imposter is a very short story set in a spaceship. It’s hardly interactive though; the only choices you make is the order in which you visit the different locations. The little text there is is well written; the only issue is that it did not always feel coherent with the spectacularly creepy ending.

Not really interactive, Rat Chasm features a single link that takes you to a news article on which the story is based. Apart from that, it simply consists of scrollable text. The story behind it is gruesome enough. Here, it has received a subjective treatment of the accounts, and a truly hellish one at that. The ending was a bit abrupt though, with a message that may be a bug of sorts. Perhaps there should be more to it.

I have no idea what is going on here.

It really doesn’t seem to be randomly generated.

The sentences are cool and coherent.

It’s very, very short.

I played it ten times in a few minutes.

But I have no idea what is going on here.

This is a choice IF with lots of endings and achievements, presumably a mechanism designed to have you replay again and again, to discover all there is. I’m afraid it did not grip me enough to motivate more than one play. The foremost reason for this, I guess, is the stereotypical American party setting that the game takes place in. The choices are to a large part dialogue options that lets you choose between fake sincerity and disinterested excuses to shift your focus elsewhere, and there is a discomfort number that represents your feeling of awkwardness. Suffice to say I have never attended an American party, and the situation described in Social Lycanthropy Disorder is so far from my reality that it was impossible to feel any involvement with the story. The writing is decent enough, however, and although it was low on spookiness, it does fit the Halloween theme well.

The most realistic story I have encountered in Ectocomp, Duck Diary is all the more scary for it. Dealing with anxiety and trauma, the protagonist finds comfort in a rubber duck that keeps them company through baths and through dreams. As a choice IF, it does not appear to be properly branching. Rather, the choices affect only the next screen. As such, you get one narrative, but with some variations in the details. The writing is of course the essence here, and it’s positively superb, mixing the realistic melancholy with touches of comforting humour provided by your rubbery friend, and a gradually unveiling horror that builds up as the story unfolds.

Really more funny than scary, this choice IF parodies the famous chess scene in The Seventh Seal. Death Plays Battleship is very short, so you can easily try all paths in a matter of minutes. As far as parodies go, this is a rather good one; Death is recognisable as based on the character in the classic film, though this one is more fun to hang out with.

A very short Choicescript game, Phantasmagoria provides a single puzzle of escape, with several endings available. As a puzzle, however, it is fairly easy; it took me two playthroughs in five minutes to emerge victorious. The writing seems to be more essential here, but though it was horrific enough, I found it a bit too chaotic to properly enter the story. It has bits of Lovecraft, touches of Shakespeare, and references to both christian and pagan occultism, but all this was disjointed and lacked a certain coherence. It certainly has its scary elements, but it would have been more terrifying with a more solid foundation that could have suspended my disbelief.

A meticulously crafted parser IF, Ritus Sacti starts off innocently enough with a school task of translating a Latin passage into English. This is as far as puzzles go in this game, and for me, someone who is interested in languages and knows next to nothing about Latin, it was actually a fun and interesting exercise. I have been wondering, as a matter of fact, whether Latin is the most evil sounding language to modern ears. The author may agree. Here, Latin is used to great effect and builds up the horror slowly, slowly. The writing is excellent throughout and may even offer up a surprise or two.

In Last Day, the only progression you will achieve is counting down to the apocalypse. With a ambitiously large map for a game made in less than four hours, it is not surprising that there is little polish, and no puzzles involved. What this IF offers you is a bit of time to explore your neighbourhood and decide how to die. In the end I managed to experience four different endings, one of which the author seems to regard as optimal.

Sumbitted to the La petite mort category in Ectocomp 2020, Fracture is a very short and slightly experimental parser IF that puts you in a precarious position and allows only a single command to be used. The whole IF is actually based around this limitation, and it makes very good use of it. Thematically centred on suffering and decay, the story is splendidly horrid, and the writing is excellent.