Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

If you look at the reviews for this game, you'll notice they say it has a lot of direct links to Youtube videos. You'll also notice this game was published in 2014. This is a bad sign. When I played, instead of the sweeping vistas I was (presumably) supposed to get, I was greeted with "This video is private." over and over again. Every time I went to a new room. Every time I clicked anything. There's a choice to look out the window, so I looked, and whoops! "This video is private." Rather gives the whole thing a different feeling than intended.

If you want to include Youtube videos in a game, I would recommend directly downloading and embedding the actual media file instead of using hyperlinks, for this exact reason.

Funnily enough, the author's webpage for this game mentions it was in the "Fear of Twine" exhibition, presumably an exhibition of Twine games. I went to fearoftwine.com and oh look, the domain has expired. Thankfully, WebArchive had my back and I can see the whole site with this link, though it's less a site and more a short interactive Twine page with links to other Twine games. There are even some I recognize. I might make an entry for it later.

Back to the game itself. It consists of two "worlds", for lack of a better word. One is a normal and horrifically boring office where you work your call center job doing customer support. The other is an alternate office that (Spoiler - click to show)slowly disappears over time, with words replaced by commas and periods until the entire thing is an expanse of nothing. It's a cool effect, but I'm sure it would've worked much better if the Youtube videos were actually functional. I agree that it resembles Degeneracy, but here (Spoiler - click to show)the switch between the two worlds, the normal world and the blank decaying one, is periodic and occurs every minute or so, without any way to stop it. And letting it continue to the end is how you win.

Hope I didn't miss anything with that review. It's possible that I was supposed to notice some awesome detail that was completely erased along with the Youtube videos.

Your daring foray into the abandoned industrial sector near downtown was just an experiment to see if you could catch sight of one of the new cryptids that had invaded your world just a few years past. Only a glimpse, and new respect (and possibly riches) would be yours!

A bit underimplemented, as all parser SpeedIF tends to be, but charming in its own right. That last message is chilling. I'd like to complain about the stove and sink being a red herring, since I spent a while flicking them on and off fruitlessly while wondering if I was supposed to set things on fire or put them out. I did figure it out eventually, though.

Hm... on second thought, I do wonder if the (Spoiler - click to show)flashlight was real at all, or some kind of hallucination? It seemed real enough while I had it, but, well.

Anyway, haunted house stories are a favorite of mine. I liked this one. The atmosphere is great and the abandoned house is well-described. I've never been one for exploring abandoned buildings, but this game makes me want to do that (ideally without the fate that befalls this main character in particular!). A good game for rainy autumn afternoons.

Walkthrough in case someone needs it: (Spoiler - click to show)Go all the way up to the attic, turn on the fusebox, and touch the wires. Then take the flashlight to the east and try to leave the house.

A man's son starts calling him by a different name; soon he finds everyone calling him by that name, and begins to question his identity. Unsettling and presents no clear answers as to why this is happening or what the root cause is. Several possible theories: is this another entity named Yarry, pulling strings? Trying to replace him? Or is he just paranoid and a bad father? The lack of clarity on the true cause makes it great.

Thoughts on endings:

(Spoiler - click to show)The ending where you reject the name is enigmatic and ambiguous. The threat still exists, but it's so ill-defined that you don't know how to fight it. Is fighting it even possible?

The ending where you accept the name took the wind out of my sails a bit. This might just be me, but I wanted a more dramatic replacement scene, where the main character ends up an unwanted stranger in his own family's home. Or something like that. That's just personal opinion though.