Ratings and Reviews by Stian

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.

Made in less than four hours, A Pilgrim provides an intriguing glimpse into a different world. As a lonely wandering pilgrim in an area reminiscent of a mythical South America, the protagonist allows you to experience a day (well, a night really) in their sandals, sharing their perspective and their dreams. There is no spooky twist or clever puzzles here, but rather strong and imaginative imagery that is strange yet familiar, lending an eerie sense of the Unheimlich.

The Long Nap is written in Dialog, and the first Å-machine game I have played locally. It’s short, clever, appropriately spooky, and solidly implemented for a La petite mort game. The playthrough took about five minutes, and I was smiling with enjoyment all of the time.

High Jinnks is a funny and well written story about a Jinn trying to get home. As a choice IF, it is more or less completely linear, the choices mainly being between funny responses.

Due to its detailed historical portrayal, A Catalan Summer gives the impression of being based on the story of a real family, describing not only the conflicts between love and family duties, but also the question of Catalan independence and the emerging anarchist movement. Whether or not the Vidal family in the story was real or imagined, the issues are approached with care and understanding. The interactivity here is similarly impressive, probably more so than in any other choice IF I have played. Part of this is the constant change of protagonist, which admittedly was slightly confusing, but lets you shape the paths of several family members, and in turn the family’s place in history. Also a bit confusing was the inclusion of parser-style navigation, with links to go east, north and so on. For a choice IF like this, it would have been more practical with simply a list of the possible destinations. Still, it provides an interesting read, no matter your choices.