Reviews by Cerfeuil

Because I don't make enough for how I use to be called a phase or a Bay Street afternoon-pick-me-up. I don't have the economic stability to actually fix the various reasons why my life is fucked up right now and quick fixes are the only ones accessible to me. I'm not affluent, so what I take is too street, and therefore morally reprehensible. There's nothing else to do in this shitty small town. There's no one else to do either. Because OSAP. Because child support. Because I'm homeless. Because I'm hungry. Because I can't afford to come down.

I am poor enough to be called an addict.

I'm not

✔ white

✔ rich

✔ able-bodied

enough to be a user, so I'm shamed as an addict.

Because my people were Chinese railroad workers whose puffing made lawmakers scared they were fucking all the white women, so they criminalized opium (except chugging and shooting it, because that was a white clean habit).

I found this game because it was linked in another game called The end of the WORD as we know it, which was an art gallery of sorts. I thought, "Wait, isn't Nested made by the guy who did Cookie Clicker?" and I was right. He's made other things too, but I don't think any of it will ever exceed the popularity of Cookie Clicker.

Cookie Clicker probably doesn't qualify for IF at this point, though, while Nested does. It's a quite fascinating game, though "game" might be a disputed term since there's not much to do besides look at things. It reminds me of the procedural world generation found in Dwarf Fortress, but where Dwarf Fortress has a lot of game mechanics attached to the procedural generation, this game is nothing but the procedural generation. The procedural generation is the only point, and boy is there a lot of it. You start with a universe, but you can zoom in to galactic superclusters and star systems and planets and countries on those planets and cities in those countries containing houses containing aliens wearing leather cloaks and the skin cells in those cloaks which are made of atoms which contain quarks which contain inside them pathways to other universes... The overall effect is one of overwhelming scale.

It reminded me of this "Metric Paper" video by CGPGrey, which similarly zooms in and out of our own universe. Mindbending.

Found this game at random through the creator's blog. It's fascinating because it's in all appearances a Twine game, but it's also a chatroom/tiny MUD. In other words, if you're playing this game and you have an internet connection, you can talk to other people in the same room as you, and they can talk back.

There was no one there when I checked it out, presumably because it's been five years and everyone's forgotten about it now. It's a shame, since some features seem to require you to talk to other people to experience them in full, like the "language virus" stuff. I believe different objects can "infect" you with different language viruses when you interact with them, which briefly changes how your chat messages look in a fun way. But there was no one else around for me to talk to.

The creator runs an art gallery in Pittsburgh, which this game is a text-based recreation of. The game was created during COVID as one of the gallery's monthly exhibitions, which couldn't be hosted in person owing to the whole worldwide pandemic business.

The game doesn't contain much "game" stuff; there are no puzzles or anything. It's basically what it says on the tin: a recreation of the real-life gallery, with links to some other interactive fiction games as exhibits of sorts. I'd played most of the games that were linked to, but there were three I hadn't seen before. Two of them, Nested by Orteil and Administer Naloxone by Gollydrat, I checked out and enjoyed. There was also a longer one, Human Errors by Kathrine Morayati, which I haven't looked at yet.

I like it mainly for the multiplayer aspect. As a bonus, the game is open-source and the source code is openly available and easily moddable. Networked multiplayer is really complex and I want to dig into the code a bit to see how the creator did it. Extra stars for the cozy experience and the sheer impressiveness of turning a Twine game into a server-based multiplayer chatroom. It reminded me somewhat of ifMUD.

It's a game about depression. You wake up hungry in your dirty, cluttered mess of an apartment, and have the option to try to fix things, or not. Menus and environmental details provide flashbacks that tell you about the protagonist's life and how they got to this point. You also encounter metaphorical demons representing your emotional struggles.

The art is minimal and evocative, while the classical piano music set me on edge. I associate classical piano music with misery for various reasons and don't like it much. I suppose it's ultimately fitting for this game. The music was quiet enough to not distract from the text, either.

Though fictional, it's a personal kind of story. I imagine the player's response will vary depending on their own experiences and how much they can relate.

A lot of people go through situations like this, I guess, where you're not sure how to pull together the motivation to continue on. In the end, you either do or you don't. The protagonist seems to have no friends or family to talk to about their struggles, so they're left to deal with it on their own and the outside world doesn't really care whether they succeed or fail. It's a harsh fact that when you're alone and at your lowest point it doesn't even seem to matter whether you do the "right" thing or not, and whether you suffer a "victory" or "defeat" in the game people call "managing your mental health", one day will still become another, and you'll still have to keep addressing your own needs, trying to stay above water.

The TV channels evoked this the most for me. The cynical channel descriptions get at the soullessness of modern media that worships profit and lauds the perfect life you'll never have:

Shots of bright beaches, breathtaking vistas and luxurious resorts comprise the majority of a snazzy travel show. The host benevolently devotes 45 seconds of the hour-long program to visiting an orphanage in the impoverished exotic destination before a change of location to dig into a seven-course meal.

An ad filled with high-pitched singing, nauseatingly bright colors and boggle-eyed creatures entices you to buy toys branded off a popular children's show.

A news segment features footage from a nearby homeless encampment, while a scrolling ticker along the bottom of the screen screams about the stock market's record highs.

You find a cooking show featuring a celebrity chef using ingredients most folks would need to mortgage their home to afford. The host oohs in awe.

An elderly couple stare at each other in gentle adoration while a man breathlessly rattles off a list of medicinal side effects.

An ad for a charity comes on, filled with images of starving children and soft, tearjerking piano music.

You find a documentary about space tourism and watch for a few moments as the world's wealthiest leave the planet. You change the channel before they can return.

This game will appeal to people who want a specific kind of linear visual novel. It has no puzzles and no choices that affect the narrative. Actually, no choices at all, as far as I can tell.

So it's closer to a linear short story than you might expect from interactive fiction, but it makes good use of the "interactive" part: there's graphics, music and sound, and each line of text is carefully paced to maintain interest. Screen transitions and sound are managed effectively to enhance the mood, e.g. the background goes dark when a character retreats into her own inner thoughts, so you get a black screen with nothing but one hard-hitting line of text that makes you sit back and say, "Dang." Happened a few times.

The overall effect is cinematic, and the third act switches up the format entirely, in a way that works very well in context.

Also, the graphics are cool. The two main characters, Chun and Nica, have fun sprite art with dynamic expressions that change based on what's happening in the story. Plus, and this is key, the photo backgrounds seem to feature the real places the main characters are traveling to.

Someone on the Itch.io page said they were "blown away by how enamoured the game is with reality". The photo backgrounds are one great example. This story is firmly rooted in the real world. It isn't shy to discuss politics or our current reality; in the opening, Nica, who's trans, says "The new US president hates people like me". Meanwhile, Chun (Spoiler - click to show)is originally from Hong Kong, but her family moved to the UK because she participated in the 2019 protests against the Chinese government and they were afraid for her safety.

The characters bring up books that actually exist (e.g. Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney), movies that actually exist (e.g. Nica and Chun watch Letters from the Big Man (2011) together, a scene that taught me about a movie I've never seen), and people who actually exist (e.g. lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall). It was immersive. I felt I was there with the characters, walking through London with them, watching them navigate their relationship together.

London is of interest to me, being the "capital of a decaying empire" and all, as the game says. Regretfully, I think Britain has pizzazz and can't make myself get over it. But the relationship is what really takes center stage here. This is less a story about London and more a story about the main characters as a couple.

The relationship was very well done. I find a lot of fictional relationships too perfect for my tastes. I'm more familiar with the part of a relationship where you're constantly second-guessing yourself, wondering if you actually like the other person or not, wondering if you're doing the right thing, than the idealized final stage where you're supposed to love and trust each other. Even with someone you've known for a long time, there's always a degree of uncertainty over how much fun you're having together, and it's something you have to constantly be aware of and ready to respond to if the answer if "not much". At least, that's how I feel.

This story got at that experience. The things Chun and Nica do are things I've done, and they felt intimately familiar. Not just the part where they're watching movies or traveling together, but the constant anxiety layered on top of that, worrying about how much intimacy the other person wants and whether that move was one step too far, did you ruin things, are you really having fun, do you really want this relationship, what kind of relationship do you want in general, and what will your life look like if you can't handle one? Will you be alone forever?

The effect is simultaneously cozy and ridiculously stressful. I had a tiny box of mints nearby and ended up eating about half of them.

If I had to offer any criticism, it would be that the ending sequence (Spoiler - click to show)felt almost too harsh compared to the two's behavior when they make up afterwards. This is Your Mileage May Vary territory, but I was wondering how the relationship could ever recover at that point, and was surprised when Nica was willing to forgive Chun after what Nica had said to her earlier. This can be chalked up to personal idiosyncrasy, though, since everyone has their own personal standards for relationship issues.

In general, really liked this one. One part I especially enjoyed was towards the end, when (Spoiler - click to show)Chun and Nica can't make themselves talk face-to-face, so they go into a virtual VRChat world together and communicate through VRChat, while sitting silently in the same room. It reminded me of the way my friends and I would talk during breaks in high school, typing rapidly to each other on Skype chat while we were all sitting in the same room and completely silent in real life. Or how we'd sometimes burn time by just pulling up the laptop and scrolling through Reddit together. A lot of people disdain the online and privilege real-world interaction, but to me it seems they're just different ways to interact with people. Chun and Nica wouldn't have met if it wasn't for the Internet connecting them across thousands of miles. The real world isn't always inherently superior.

That said, everyone needs to live in the real world to some extent. I guess navigating the boundaries between online and offline is what every person needs to manage on their own, deciding what they want and how much is enough.



Story excerpt:

Melodrama is only melodrama to those who don't share the same concerns and stakes of the characters.

We have been taught to withhold our emotions, to calculate, to belittle those who make a mountain out of a molehill.

In short, we are taught to be monsters to each other.

---

Because we are monsters, I see relationships as fragile, ephemeral, always in need of repair. They are susceptible to decline when we stop being proactive about maintaining them. We fool ourselves into thinking they are small matters until it is too late.

This is a game about assembling a portrait by selecting one of four motifs (cat, turnip, boot, astronaut). Each time you make your selection, you see some text, and the process repeats a certain number of times until you reach an ending.

My first playthrough of this game took about five minutes, and I put that in as the time it takes to complete the game, but it's misleading since you can play many, many times and get many, many different endings. There's an ending achievement system and extra content unlocked in the "guide" (which is more like another part of the game) as you achieve more endings. Over about two hours I've found dozens of endings, and I'm sure there are more. Probably. The mechanics are purposefully obtuse. I didn't get enough sleep last night.

The writing is very abstract. For the most part it's impossible to pin down a concrete meaning to the words. It feels like modernist poetry. Or postmodernist poetry. Whatever it is, I'm not smart enough to know. Something faintly autobiographical but presented in a scattered, fragmented way. Fiction and reality juxtaposed. Snippets of a life. The repeating symbols of the cat, turnip, boot, astronaut, and wolf hovering alongside, the wolf in the gallery, which might mean something if you squint, maybe not...

There are also overarching returns to abuse, pain and trauma. It feels a bit like a nightmare, in that way.

And there's a lot of playing around with the look of default Inform menus. The standard ways of displaying Game A by Author B, Short Description C, Release D, You Have Reached Ending E, get messed with until they become part of the conceit.

The occasional passage with more clarity describes an American life, the life of someone who apparently has or had several cats, who has lived through something that might be a marriage or relationship, and mental illness and solitude, who stares out the window at night and sees the blinking lights of suburban houses... a ground truth buried in this labyrinth of images. But it's difficult to tell for sure.

I liked it, being a fan of surrealism. The sleep deprivation also might've helped, who's to say.

Finally I want to mention that in the Pactdice TTRPG setting created by Wildbow, there are locations called "Paths", extradimensional dreamrealms that can be navigated by "Finders" in a videogame-like fashion. By completing the right steps, a Finder can beat a Path (like beating a game) and receive a reward. But the Paths are also occupied by the Wolf, the manifestation of your personal trauma, who wants to torture and kill you while destroying everything you've spent your life building. It's a pretty cool setting. It has absolutely nothing to do with this game, but I was reminded of it due to the Wolf thing.

I will probably keep playing this and may update the review if I unlock anything that explains more.

An excerpt:

Natural Nature
A spiraling fancy by Kim I. Colburns
Release V / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

You're ruining everything.

Throne Room
Are you a good kid? A good little person?

All night you have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
(*C*) cat dreaming of wolves
(*T*) turnip at the she-wolf's breast (times incorporated: 1)
(*B*) underwater footprint
(*A*) martian canal hobo (times incorporated: 2)

>b

It doesn't hurt.

Stop yelling!
It doesn't hurt
much





*** The Lithium Makes Your Blood Bitter ***



Just try to enjoy it.

The basic mechanic of this game is fascinating. There's an infinite number of "pages", some pages have text, and you can only change which page you are on by clicking a plus or minus button. No flipping ahead, and importantly, no way of telling when you're done. Is there more? Should you continue on? Is it worth continuing on?

That last question is crucial, since this game is also, as the description indicates, about suicide. The symbolism is inherent in the gameplay. To even reach the first bits of text, you need to first click through many pages of darkness. There's a lot of black space, and moments where you're alone with your own feelings, uncertain, clicking a button over and over again without knowing if you should really keep trying. The game itself comments on this.

This is the game.

...

It's fucking boring.

...

Don't tell me it gets better.

Dark apartment room. Smells like rotting food. The stain of a woman on the wall, grease patterns frozen in contortions of great pain.

Acceptable delusions for trapped people:
-tested by God
-emitting pheromone that marks oneself for cruelty
-cursed
-no one would treat a human being this way therefore i am not human
-i deserved to be treated this way

It began late last year while Rebecca was attending Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland

...

For more than a year...15 middle-school children...urged her to kill herself

...

Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide.

...

She then changed her online username from Rebecca to “That Dead Girl” and left her phone on her bed.

We cut ourselves, starve ourselves, blame ourselves, kill ourselves.

Oppression removes its fingerprints by forcing us to use the knife on ourselves. Self-harm is harm.

...

They try to explain away our pain with vague gestures at mental illness, hysteria, some magical disease we acquired that couldn't possibly be explained by the fact that you dehumanizedrapedabusedharassedgaslitostracizedliedbeattorturedmutilated us.

...

Creating the circumstances by which one is forced to contemplate their own death is a form of violence.

When you see a person, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is least human and 10 is most human.

...

You already do that anyways.

“We aren’t in Denmark! This is not Hamlet!”

“We are in Denmark,” Horatio speaks up stonily, meeting your irate gaze. “I have lived in Elsinore’s arms my entire life, and I will die in them.”

“How could we be in Denmark?! None of us are speaking Danish!” you retort, ticking off your arguments on your fingers. “We’re all speaking modern English, with American accents! You’re experiencing a...a mass hallucination, or something.”

“How else would we speak?”

I don’t want to clutch some stranger’s hand while I bleed out on a supermarket floor and beg them to get my grandparents to safety and tell the cop everything that happened—to swear on God (the capital G for Jesus one, not the lowercase one we throw around for emphasis at home) in my most perfect English that I didn’t do anything but exist between the oranges and apples and maybe glance the wrong way with my chinky eyes, and please, officer, we’re just out getting groceries and our parents are waiting at home and our grandparents don’t speak English very well, I’ll translate for them—

Disclaimer: extraordinarily rambly and somewhat offtopic review. I hope I am not offending Polish and/or European and/or non-European people with this review!

I'm from the US and have never been to Poland. There's a part of me that badly wants to travel to Poland, or to another European country, or to any other country really. For a long time I've been fascinated by how people in different countries live. I'd love to see every country in the world before I die, though that's an unrealistic and prohibitively expensive goal, dangerous depending on the country, and probably not worth it, since traveling to a place is hardly the same as living there. Visiting an area as a tourist who doesn't understand the language is the opposite of being a local. The real shame is that just by being born in a certain place, you're locked out of the vast majority of the world, and you'll never be able to really communicate with the majority of humans who only speak languages you'll never be fluent in.

Anyway. To a loser American like me, Poland and other European countries have a certain sophisticated aura... of history, of rich culture and tradition, of bygone medieval kingdoms and such... not to mention the history of Poland itself, which has gone through periods of subsumption by various empires before arising yet again like a glorious phoenix from death and alright these previous sentences are laying it on thick, so I will add that I may or may not have gone through a "countryball" phase in school and this may or may not be relevant. (Don't search up "countryball" if you value your opinion of what "the kids these days" are doing with their free time.)

Also I will add that I know every country does all kinds of heinous things. And that Europe gets to be known as a mystical land of sophistication in part due to the legacy of European colonialism. (British colonialism is why I'm even writing this post in English, if you think about the history of the US.) And that people in other countries are just people and there's nothing particularly special about them at the end of the day just because they exist somewhere. And that every place has problems and we shouldn't put any particular country on a pedestal, or glorify what shouldn't be glorified. I probably don't get out enough, and should touch grass and stop fantasizing about international travel. I probably won't.

Since travel costs too much time and money, is reading a story from someone who lives in a certain country a substitute for traveling there? Can it provide you with the experience of really being a local? I've never been to Poland, but reading this story felt like being there, if only for a few short minutes. We have trains where I live in the US, too, which aren't so different from Polish trains. I think. Tracks going off into the fog, mournful calls in the night and all that. But at the same time, there's an extra level of mystique for me because these are Polish trains. Inheritors of Polish history, imbued with that Polish "aura"... If I saw them, would they have Polish text on the sides? And the people within would talk in Polish about Polish problems, as they travel to and from faraway cities I'll never touch in my lifetime, etc...

For me, stories about life in other countries are fun because they can teach you about places you've never been and never will go to. Particularly if these are countries you might never visit, particularly if these stories focus on history, culture, politics, and all the things that make up a different society. This story is about the specific experience of being stuck in rural Poland during Covid, and has details specific to that. Musings on the difference between village life and city life, and how rural hometowns (home villages in this case, I guess) can suck you in until you find it difficult to return and are relegated to watching the trains pass you by, thinking about the life you could've had. Nothing I've ever experienced or will experience, though I've heard of how isolated North American hometowns can trap people, and reading about the Polish equivalent fascinates me. This was a pattern for me with this short story: seeing details that remind me of things I've seen in the US, but more alluring because they're Polish. How much of this is myself projecting my own deranged European obsession onto the story, I don't know. There's also a detail highly specific to Poland, made all the more special because the previous details could be generalized to rural railroads internationally but this is highly localized: a mention of "decaying farming machines that remember Soviet Union". For obvious reasons, we don't have Soviet farming machines in the US. The combination of familiar and unfamiliar things is breathtaking. It evoked for me the feeling of international travel, the strange wonderousness of seeing things almost but not quite familiar. Seeing the great unity and diversity of humanity (insert spiel about the beauty of humanity here). I want to go to Poland and see the old Soviet remnants. I want to travel to places that have been touched by a different kind of history. I'm fantasizing about international travel again.

One last note: There are a few "Polish-isms" in this writing that are really charming to me, like omitting "the" before "Soviet Union". As one of those US citizens who are so commonly mocked for only being able to write in one language, I have great admiration and respect for the author who can write in English, presumably Polish, and possibly even more.

A story that is actually seven stories, intertwined. You are Bluebeard's eighth wife and walk around his home accompanied by the ghosts (literal talking heads) of his previous wives. Each has a story of how she came to meet and marry the husband who would kill her, and each story is compellingly told.

It made me think about the institution of marriage as a whole. I saw some feminist critiques of marriage a while back, arguing that it's a forced labor contract where the man has all the power and the woman has none and must do unpaid domestic work at his bidding. This is especially true of marriage in historical times, and most of these wives don't seem to be from the modern world.

A woman who marries someone is traditionally expected to go along with his wishes, accompany him wherever he wants and defer to him for judgement. If he wants you to leave home and go with him, you go. If he wants you to clean house and play hostess, you do, because he gave you everything, didn't he? If being an old and single woman isn't socially acceptable, you have to bear with it. And if the marriage turns bad and divorce isn't allowed, there is really no escape. As a side note: In the US, banks could prevent women from opening their own bank accounts independently, without a signature from their husbands, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974. And today, of course, there are still countries in the world where the status of women's rights is quite miserable.

WIFE #3

...[T]here were matters that needed to be tended to at the estate, he told me. We would have to travel back. My heart dropped. I had forgotten that we were now one entity, and in all the dreams I had of this moment, he was the one telling me that he had to leave, not that we had to leave. I opened my mouth to protest, but already I knew it was futile. Behind me, my sisters trailed up from the ocean, silently watching our conversation unfold. I told myself I would not let myself cry in front of them, but in all honesty, I was too angry at him and at myself to cry.

WIFE #2

When we were married, we paraded through the streets of my small village, the dress he chose all but swallowing me up. I held my head high as we passed by in the carriage, looking each person who had referred to me as a devil in the eye. Still smiling as he waved to the villagers outside, he had asked me which of them I would like to punish for wanting me dead. My mouth opened and closed in part-astonishment, part-fear. There was no need to reply now, he had said. Think about it and let me know if there are any names. You own them now.

There were a few days before our honeymoon began in earnest, and the question kept me awake at night like a hot coal burning in my chest. I lay awake long after Bluebeard had begun to snore softly. I had the power to destroy them now, but did that mean I should? I thought back to the year, how the comments and barbs directed at my parents had at first been subtle, then more pointed, until they became bolder and bolder, to the point where my father returned home with bruises and scrapes after getting into a fight at the tavern, and my mother was snubbed by all our neighbours. I unfurled the list of grievances in my heart, and made my mind up.

The day before we left on a tour of the mainland, I whispered the names into his ear. He reacted as if I were merely giving him the names of flowers I liked. Smiling, he patted my hand and said that he would take care of it.

I had almost forgotten about it completely by the time we returned. As our carriage drove through the village, we passed by the big gates that led to Bluebeard’s estate. Like a welcome parade, there were the villagers I had named, tied spread eagled, nude, to the thorny brambles that surrounded the chateau. Their cries for us to be merciful were like a symphony to my ears. I turned to Bluebeard, who had grinned at me. I hope my wife has enjoyed her welcome, he said. The gates closed on the villagers’ cries.