Reviews by Jonathan Verso
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Stopped playing after an unintuitive glitch, November 29, 2023I didn't play this game until the end because I encountered game-breaking glitches. This review will focus on the parts in the beginning that I was able to play instead.
The hunger mechanic, which is a traditional turncount-based type that nags you with variations on how hungry you are and how you need to eat, is very unfortunately timed.
(Spoiler - click to show)
[You see dozens more bodies stacked up in a neat row; with corpses piled several layers high. They are stacked higher towards the end, forming a slope. While the power had been on, you were sure that the cold had helped keep these bodies hidden and preserved. The power has apparently been off for some time now, as many of the bodies have started to melt into one another.
The stench, which had been sealed off, is now overwhelming and more repulsive than you can even imagine. Barely suppressing the urge to vomit, faint or do both, you close the freezer and back away. As you back away from the freezer, you stumble over one of the dead bodies, knocking it out of line. You really hope that someone is not going to care about that because you are too disgusted to fix it.
You can’t think about anything but eating at the moment. ]
Immediately after being horrified and repulsed by a grotesque scene of rotting human carnage, the only thing you can think of is eating. (The writing itself is quite functional, but the juxtaposition makes it emotionally silly.)
Otherwise, the hints that you've been infected are unsubtle.
(Spoiler - click to show)Or maybe you just never liked chickpeas. You feel an unusual craving for some meatloaf, but at least your hunger pains are satiated.
I stopped playing after acquiring the skillet as the walkthrough suggested, and using it to attack the random zombie that appeared. Despite text indicating that I succeeded, for some reason another piece of text suggested I failed and died.
The concepts and writing are good but the implementation is frustrating.
Link doesn't work, April 30, 2023Note: the current link to the game is broken. I found a working link here:
http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2020/Games/Doppeljobs/Doppeljobs_v2/doppeljobs.html
Breezy puzzlefest that you should probably consult a walkthrough for, August 10, 2022I liked the puzzles! They fit the sort of casual, escape room atmosphere, but it felt a bit guess-the-verb and it was difficult to figure out what to do. (Spoiler - click to show)For example... I kept trying to climb the shelf to get the key on the hook, and didn't realize I could just reach it by standing on a bucket. I got stuck and relied on the walkthrough to figure out what to do, but the game wasn't long or frustrating enough for that to be a huge problem.
I also thought the story was pretty thin, and the ending, though properly lighthearted which is the most important thing, felt a little disappointingly (Spoiler - click to show)meta with the reference to an underimplemented room. I would have liked to have seen it developed a bit more.
Slim-backed historical-modern horror story about women's places in time, March 9, 2022Really interesting game! This is very much of an exploration and a story rather than a puzzlefest, and I think it does those two things quite well. There was a very hard puzzle (how to re-enter the house) that I got stuck on, but the >hint feature allowed me to progress.
There's a lot of pleasing description here and a nice narrative voice (Spoiler - click to show)(with a contrast from 'I' to 'you'), standard of Veeder's writing. Although the end scenes were my favorite and what I remembered of this game for several years, I also really enjoyed the early game where you go around a museum you're a tour guide for and get to touch everything hidden behind the velvet ropes.
I especially liked the response if you try to >undo after completing the game.
The story has a satisfying ending. I think that's harder to find in horror stories nowadays, and I thought it was very effective, especially with how it was handled. (Spoiler - click to show)The woman that used to live in the house, with all the sexism and prejudices of the time, switches places with 'you', the tour guide living in the modern age. You'll get used to the uncomfortable bed and loneliness eventually, because it's time for her to try out her new car keys and autonomy!
(Spoiler - click to show)The use of a separate character choosing to leave her historical life (whilst fucking over someone else) instead of only having the narrator ruminating on how much it must have sucked or having it buried in subtext really made it for me. I especially liked how Lilian Woodingdean still felt like part of the 1800s even as she was ready to escape it. She dismisses the maid's room as unimportant if you try to examine it, and denigrates your attempts to play with the children's toys. Even the museum which prides itself on historical accuracy can't get everything right, and she provides corrections like how the rocking horse would never be provided to kids - no, that would teach them to be complacent with real horses. Her analysis of how values have changed as linearly pointing towards more convenient and comfortable makes very much sense from her perspective, and along with the mild, almost wistful tone that seems to be stereotypically packed with statements like those also comes with her implicit understanding that convenient and comfortable are things that she'd prefer to live with, given the option, and she's going to have such a great time in your car and modern life!
Creepy horror game that plays with the idea of puzzlefests, December 31, 2021So, you're in a house staying with a acquaintance after an incident left you with nowhere else to go. Maybe you have some ideas of how you should behave, or about what kind of houseguest to be. But, you're not playing as you. You're playing as Helena.
I think this is an interesting game to contrast with non-IF games. The closest equivalent to it I can think of is horror RPG maker games such as Ib, without a obvious goal but to go around solving puzzles anyway. The Blind House is less dreamlike with its grounded setting inside someone's home where you interact with mundane objects. You have puzzles such as how to fill a vase with flowers, how to cover an annoyingly bright window, and more traditionally slightly-insane IF puzzles like figuring out what a code on a blouse corresponds to, finding the password to a computer, and figuring out how to call someone. What doesn't feel quite homely does fit what you expect out of retro IF. And on the whole, even when you realize what you're doing is strange, you have to if you want to proceed in the game. To quote Emily Short's review, "Behaving in a “normal” IF adventurer way was, within the context of the fiction, behaving in a completely creepy and unacceptable way" and that's a really fun thing to play with.
And the payoff is really great. I've found lots of horror games unwilling to explain themselves recently, but this game does not turn away from the weird shit that you've been doing in the end.
Are the puzzles fair? Eh. You'll probably need the walkthrough at some point, but it's included and not too much of a pain. A lot of smaller points are skippable if you don't explore, but the horror would not work so well if you didn't go out of your way to explore and solve these puzzles. It's impossible to get to the end without exploring, so if you find yourself relying on the walkthrough because the puzzles are impossible, I recommend playing again in a few months when you generally know what you need to do but don't remember the specifics.
Concerning problematicness, as stated by another review - the nature of this game as the player as a (Spoiler - click to show)creepy person trying to trap the victim in their own home necessitates an abuser and a victim. While I thought (Spoiler - click to show)Helena's twisted 'protectiveness' and self-justifications that could be read as romantic were a lot more cheesy and obviously evil than scary, especially compared to the her outright denial of what she was doing and the subtlety of her not being able to look in the mirror (because it was covered with bandages), I don't think that that's very out of place in a horror game. Subtextual or not, it's about someone (Spoiler - click to show)predating on someone else which is inherently creepy, and the game being about two women means that the relationship between them will be read as creepy. I don't think it came as a surprise as to what the story was building to, as you-as-Helena must do some very invasive things to reach that point. I also think a benefit is that this story is entirely about the Helena and Marissa - at full tilt, (Spoiler - click to show)the psychotic lesbian isn't a footnote or a joke or side character, she's the heart of the game, so if that's what you're looking for you can have it explored in its entirety here, and if you're not it's not a surprise what you'll be getting into.
My favorite horror moments include
(Spoiler - click to show)
Superglue disappearing from your inventory
Not being able to call anyone
The beginner's quality creepy paintings in the drawer, that Helena presumably made
White roses stained auburn
Twenty bandaids, ten for each arm
Somethings that might be better of fixed
(Spoiler - click to show)
You cannot call Marissa because you don't know anyone named Marissa... the default error message is silly when applied to people you obviously know
The phantom phone call will keep triggering whenever you step out of the room, making it a bit comical
Short and sparse twine game where you play as a penned zombie, November 21, 2021The link is broken, but can be found at the creator's itch.io.
The writing is sparse and describes only the essentials. As a zombie, you're characterized by hulk speech like in Lost Pig but you don't ever lose control or act truly monstrous. It rather seems like you're just another survivor. (Spoiler - click to show)And with the amount of memories and self awareness Janet has, seems like letting her out of the pen wouldn't be such a bad idea. She knows how to save food, how to use it for traps, can choose between attacking people or not... You spend a good amount of time observing people with more interesting choices in this game.
A fairly enjoyable 15-30 minutes. I played it a few times but the endings don't seem to have any major differences.
A grotesque and morbid short story where you find ways to murder the first sons. I did not find it to be an experience that I would find any enjoyment out of on its own, but it comes with design commentary (>COM) and religious subtext that I found interesting which is what led me to keep playing. This is not a fun game to play.
The strong points were the richness of the victims' lives. You have people trying to protect their houses by painting them with pitch, trying to desperately copy rituals and decide to not go outside, people trying to catch the cloud with a net, lots of slaves that are still firstborn children and definitely not getting freed. The weak points were the more overstated ones. I think the chilling look into the morality of the Bible had me come off feeling the right amount of unpleasant, but the adherence to the lesser known exact writing of the Bible such as the scene about how the pharaoh breaks down about how Yahweh mind controlled him was trying too hard to find something to point at and say this is evil. It's already pretty evil, no need to gild the lily then paint it with lamb's blood.
Fun and spooky romp through a strange amusement park, November 19, 2021As a fan of Chandler Groover's writing, the setting of this game was nice. There are references to many of Groover's games that were fun to find and read. This game is probably better enjoyed playing some of his first!
I enjoyed the puzzles generally, but found one of them to be too difficult. The (Spoiler - click to show)creaky house was a huge pain to think about. Mapping it is probably necessary, and while that is traditional, I hate mapping puzzles and was happy to skip it using the in-game provided hints which were direct and helpful. I also found myself a little disappointed by the (Spoiler - click to show)midnight laserfight puzzle which seemed somewhat barebones where the items you could pick up and drop didn't matter. My favorite puzzle was the (Spoiler - click to show)menagerie puzzle with foods named after Groover's other games. Delectable and fun to strategize! I really enjoyed the use of the cake as well, which had a nice parallel to (Spoiler - click to show)Eat Me with progression being marked by what you eat and destroy, and the shenanigans with the animals in the petting zoo. The in-game hint system is very useful if you are having trouble, so if you're unsure about this game, the puzzles shouldn't put you off. It also helps that this game is impossible to be made unwinnable.
The (Spoiler - click to show)steadily more horror-themed amusement park was a nice touch, but this game by no means trips into the actual horror that marks Groover's games. You get about what you see going into Grooverland, with about Disney-level scares.
Story notes: (Spoiler - click to show)Although the beginning of the game really had the feel of a ten year old blitzing through the day that just for her, the high queen! I felt the ending was more caged in. Even if you don't interact with the family members early in the game, you still must pick up their dropped items and use them in the last section. But in the early game it's easy to ignore your siblings and parents in favor of the cool amusement park with very little dialogue from them, so going back to the idea of using their love to defeat the monster and save the park feels kind of hollow. The ending being unmissable thus makes it feel like, well, you have to do this to move on the plot, and somewhat unearned by the player.
Source code story, October 26, 2021Huh, this was really interesting. As other reviewers have stated, this is a story that you read from the source code as well as the game.
(Spoiler - click to show)
The "locked out" feeling that you get from playing the empty main game as compared to the vast treasures of the source code is something sublime and unique. I really like the usage of large numbers and the "It is..." construction as what appear to be part of the code but also make literary sense.
Also, this has been a really fun way of getting to know how the Inform language works better.
Form follows function, October 26, 2021A game that is functionally unplayable without the source code, for the contest that for which it was designed. The source is lovely poetry and tells a story on its own.
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