Reviews by Cerfeuil
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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.
A short, creepy game with a conversational interface of the kind I rarely see in Inform, much less 4-hour speed games, so that deserves praise on its own. The principal antagonist is great. Love it.
Thoughts on the story:
(Spoiler - click to show)I thought of parasites from the opening line, probably because my own Ectocomp entry was about parasites. On reading farther it seems to be a bodysnatcher situation specifically, where the entity eventually replaces you entirely. Based on those lines about "the scent of your heart" and "the sound of your blood moving", it starts off growing somewhere inside your body and eventually replaces you. Maybe it hijacks your muscles, leading to with a puppetry situation where it's controlling you while you're paralyzed inside your own body. Or maybe it grows into the tender fatty cells of your cerebellum and kills off your consciousness, so you never see yourself become a living corpse. I mean, we've got options here. Wonder which would be worse. On the one hand you might end up completely trapped, watching from within as something that isn't you commandeers your body for the rest of your life... on the other hand, if that's the case you'd at least still be alive. Maybe you could even try to negotiate. Maybe I'm making stuff up. Anyone remember Aftran from Animorphs?
I'm a fan of this one because I'm biased towards parasites. You can hardly get more intimate or deadly than having a "something" living inside you, squirming around in your guts, knotting up your neurons... Didn't someone say love is also a parasitism? Growing in your brain, a disease with a possibly-unwilling carrier? Am I making stuff up again? The parasite in this case resembles an abusive or jilted lover, demanding more than you can give, resenting that you can't give it all, always wanting more. An all-consuming love interlaced with a love of consumption. Devouring someone from the inside out.
You don't want that to happen to you. Obviously.
Funny game. You invite a fey/demon/eldritch abomination over to your house to make a deal with it, and as you can expect, there are a number of ways the deal can end badly for you. I've seen a lot of stories with this exact concept, yet somehow it never gets old. The variety of ways you can get screwed over by tiny differences in wording are thououghly entertaining (though maybe not for our poor sop of a protagonist). I failed the first time because (Spoiler - click to show)I made the mistake of telling it that the winning lottery numbers were "all I wanted", and then it got me when I exchanged them for the prize money, because of course I didn't just want the numbers. I succeeded in not ruining my life the second time, but had a lot of fun going through the other paths to see how many bad ends there were. Answer: a lot. There's a level of black humor/schadenfreude involved in trying to rack up all the fates worse than death you can.
I do think the long wait on the ending screen could be slowed down a bit, or maybe replaced with an immediate link to the main menu, because I was sitting there for a while trying to figure out what to do.
I was recommended this game because it has parasites in it. I love parasites. Now, the implementation is a bit finicky because it's a SpeedIF, and I got stuck early on and had to use David Welbourn's walkthrough. (Where would we be without him?) Similarly, there's a few grammatical/spelling errors floating around. But the main draw of !parasites! is still there.
She has become thin this past weeks, as the parasites ate her brain. Her skin is shimmering light blue, and sometimes you can see hints of their movements under her skin. You barely see the woman whose touch once made you shudder, whom you held and whose breathing you learnt to listen to when you couldn't sleep. Monsters are eating her, and she has become one herself.
Look at that. Beautiful, right?
I would heartily recommend this game for parasite fans.
Don't remember how I got this in my bookmarks. Maybe Twitter. Anyway, this can barely be called a game, since it's unfinished. There's only two things you can really interact with, and one NPC, the door, who doesn't even have all its dialogue written out. Some of it is just "DIALOG".
Why bother rating it and putting it on IFDB, then? Because this has one of the most spectacular interfaces of any Twine game I've ever played. Period. The person who made it is a professional web designer, and it shows. This is a three-dimensional escape room, IN TWINE, where you can choose which direction you face at any given moment (north/south/east/west) and the room will rotate as you face that direction. I imagine it's all done with CSS effects behind the scenes, and the end result is unbelievably cool. The flashing GIFs are cool too. Shame there's no substance to it. Not even an ending. You tell the door you'll fight it if it doesn't let you out of the room, and you get an unfinished COMBAT prompt, and that's all there is.
Fine, I lied, there's also a dev page that lets you access unfinished parts of other locations. Some interesting ideas there, but nothing much. Most of the paths kick you out to a placeholder featureless room.
In its current state, the game is just a tech demo. It seems like the creator lost motivation to work on it, which is why it was published in this state. Unfortunate.
This game had a cult following at some point, which is how I heard about it. Nowadays the subreddit is pretty dead. I blame this on the game, which is really a website with hundreds of pages to explore, being difficult to parse and therefore inaccessible to newcomers.
The website has an odd and intentionally cryptic storyline, where you are a Probe exploring Terminal 00, part of a network of Terminals whose goal is to "Open the Gate". This goal is stymied by attacks from something called the CoS. If that doesn't make much sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to me, either. There are several pages that explain the lore farther, most of which can be accessed from the Assistance page, but don't expect clarity.
I think surreal and cryptic storylines definitely can work under certain circumstances, but the writing here just isn't very good, and there's too much nonsense being thrown around for me to really understand any part of it. Combine this with the fact that some webpages are locked behind cryptographic puzzles and I really don't know what's going on. Not only that, but I'm not motivated to find out what's going on. I'd explore a bit, dig deeper if it interests you, and leave if it doesn't.
Why three stars despite this? Because the website looks mind-bogglingly cool. Awesome glitchy aesthetic and a lot of unique visuals. Also music. Downside is that the music and visuals take a while to load, but they're worth looking at for a few minutes.
I voted playtime to be half an hour, but it depends on how much time you're willing to spend on this. I can see someone using hours of their life to decode the messages. I can also see someone looking around, getting bored, and leaving within a few minutes. It depends. I personally can't imagine spending too much time here, though.
When the world ended, life became an unpleasant costume. You have only ever wanted to gift it to something else, but it is not so easy now.
Instead you lie here, reduced to nothing.
I heard about this game because it was entered into the 2024 Independent Games Festival, and there were a few mentions of that on social media. It's a relatively short browser text adventure with excellent aesthetics and an intriguing setting. The beginning is a purposeful riff on A Dark Room, a short melancholic prologue, but it soon opens up in spectacular fashion. The rest is an exploration game that reminded me of Porpentine and other surreal IF I've played.
The music, sparse visuals and sleek CSS/JS create a fascinating UI. One log in the middle shows everything you've done, while objects to the side can be clicked on and interacted with. Connections, also hovering to the side, will take you to a new location when clicked. Everything is strategically placed to make it feel like you're truly walking around this decaying world while you scroll up and down.
The writing style has the same conservation of detail you find in games like their angelical understanding. Stark, minimalist sentences sketching out a surreal landscape, mentioning strange facts and never elaborating upon them. You get the sense of a far larger world beyond the game's confines, whose full history will never be explained.
Setting also gives me that Dark Souls/Porpentine feeling. It's a post-apocalyptic world defined by ruin: we've got a poison swamp and abandoned buildings and wind blowing through endless wastelands, outlined in neon pink and green against a dark background. The randomly-generated names for the protagonist and their monsters have Dark Souls boss vibes. Hallowed Exile, anyone? Weeping Knight? But what really makes the writing tick is a pervasive melancholy and isolation that comes across with each location, a longing for a world so long gone it's been forgotten in every way that matters. But it must have been better than this.
Individually, the sentences are just okay (there are a few comma splices). But combined with the music and gameplay, they shine.
There's also the monsters, part of the game's core conceit. They're represented as collections of squares that float around the screen, following you wherever you go. Clicking one opens an interface that lets you feed and further interact with it. I found myself not directly focused on them, more interested in exploring the setting, but I was attached to their little sound effects and the occasional notifications you get about them sleeping and releasing waste and so on. You can feed them, which is the primary purpose of the items you collect as you wander around. They are companions in the vast solitude of post-apocalyptic life. And they are supposed to, eventually, die.
I'd like to emphasize "supposed to". My main problem with this game is long before that happens, you run out of things to do. The description says "Travel with and care for small creatures, exploring an alienating, nostalgic world until the inevitable end of those creatures’ lives", and you do travel with and care for the creatures, but before any of them died I had already discovered everything there was to discover in the world. The process of discovery was great, and it's not a small game, so it took me about twenty minutes and maybe forty (?) locations to see everything. But nothing really changes in a location after you go there the first time.
Yeah, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a robed figure who can give you extra pets if you talk to them in the town and then swamp, but I could only find them once and never again. After that, it was just wandering around places I'd already been, looking for other new things and not finding them. Possibly I missed some important location or other, but I spent a while double-checking places I'd already been, and going through all the connections between places, so I don't think so.
I don't know how long creatures are supposed to live. Each of mine had a number slowly counting down from 100, which I assume is lifespan. Here's the thing: by the time I got bored and decided to end my game, the lowest lifespan counter I could see was still at, what, 70? The lifespan needs to be greatly reduced, or the number of things to do in the game greatly increased. Probably both. Alternatively, I would appreciate some kind of proper ending that could be discovered by exploring the game world and raising your monsters right, since I was looking for one but never found anything that felt satisfying. A part of me expected them to evolve based on how you feed them, but that never happens.
To the game's benefit, it does include one ending, which is how I terminated my playthrough. I wouldn't call it the satisfying ending I want, because (Spoiler - click to show)there is no resolution. Just ran out of things to do and decided to enter the wasteland and "forget myself", i.e. die, with my two creatures still around me. I could've beelined to that location and done that from the start, and it wouldn't have changed anything. It felt unsatisfactory to me. In some ways it's consistent with the themes of decay and a longing for something so far gone it can never be restored, but it didn't tie into anything I had done. And the prelude to that ending, wandering a world devoid of secrets because you've already discovered them all, wasn't fun and really took away from the joy of earlier gameplay. It doesn't help that some items in certain places respawn when I think they shouldn't, such as (Spoiler - click to show)the bones in the decaying hut. That feels like a genuine bug.
Despite the game's flaws, I'd still recommend it to people who like the aesthetics of Dark Souls and post-apocalyptic ruins. See the sights, you know?
One final note. The game has an account creation feature, and according to the itch.io page, apparently server-based multiplayer support. I didn't notice anything multiplayer when I was playing, but it's likely that nobody was playing at the same time as me, since this game is basically unknown. I don't know what effect multiple people playing at the same time would have, if any. It's possible that the server-based multiplayer support is just a way to easily save your progress. I made an account, but played through the game in one sitting so there was ultimately no need for it, and the ending I chose deleted my account anyway.
The itch.io page also says the game will get future updates, so maybe the game will be improved in the future. It'd be nice if we got more endings and more ways to interact with the monsters.
Quotes:
THE SHADOW UNDER THE LONG BRIDGE: A small cove rests in the shadow of the bridge. Discarded things gather here.
A weeping beast crouches on the edge of the rocks with what limbs he has to spare.
> CLOSE YOUR EYES
Faint chatter, steps, wheels. The bridge remembers those who came before. Their imprints echo quietly from above.
---
Wind unhindered by life.
It cuts your hands more kindly than any blade.
---
The little creature approaches the water’s edge. The tide ebbs and flows, the shallower parts of the ocean lack its signature opaque darkness. Instead filled with a quiet radiance.
> WALK INTO THE WATER
It’s cold. If you were an older thing it would hunger for you, but alas. You are not ready yet.
Here's another game I found online at random and thought would be a good fit for this site. It takes the form of a timeline, where you can click a specific event to change its outcome, and by doing so change the course of world history. You only have a few events that can be changed to start with, but things butterfly pretty fast.
It's interesting to click around and see the alternate futures you can come up with, but the game has several major issues. The biggest is that it needs some way to make certain events incompatible with each other, so you don't get something like "1930: Sealand takes over the entire world. All other countries become colonies of Sealand. 1947: The Cold War begins between the US and USSR." I also really wish you could change events that are themselves the results of other changed events. That would lead to more in-depth and interesting gameplay.
It's still kind of fun to see how much you can change, though.
This game is vaguely reminiscent of two other games I've played recently, Pageant and PhD Simulator. All three are simulation games with a central focus on grinding through, yep, school. Grad school in the case of PhD Simulator, high school in the case of Pageant and this game. PhD Simulator and this game are both made in custom engines and both very light on writing and story, letting narratives develop naturally through the player's gameplay. Pageant, on the other hand, has an actual storyline about a high schooler named Karen Zhao who applies to a beauty pageant for the sake of college apps. But there are still stats for the beauty pageant and specific requirements that must be met to win, and like in this game, Karen needs to get into a good college. For the sake of your future, they say. It will be worth it, they say.
What's the commonality between these games? They all use resource management mechanics to capture the soulless grind of the American university system and how far people need to go to "make it". PhD Simulator and this game both have a sanity-type mechanic, where your hope lessens day after day as you do nothing but work and study and work, no time for hobbies when you need to meet the metrics or you'll fall behind. Pageant has no sanity stat, only a time stat, but Karen does pass out in the middle of school due to lack of sleep. One of the things you can do when waking up in the nurse's office is say you're fine and go back to class. Can't miss the important content, after all. Look, all these other people will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them. All these other people have gotten their PhDs already. You don't want to fall behind.
In Pageant, the main goal is winning the beauty pageant and not getting into Yale, but that beauty pageant is indirectly about getting into Yale. You're not allowed to do something for its own sake, just to have fun. If you do, it's time you're wasting and should be channeling towards a greater end.
From a post on r/ApplyingToCollege, the subreddit where this game was posted. This post has 2000+ upvotes:
As I write down the activities and awards that describe me, I feel no passion nor excitement over them. Orchestra? Forced to pick an instrument in middle school. Model United Nations? ao's love that, right? Community Service? I couldn't give a single shit about this toxic ass community of selfish humans that doesn't bat an eye what happens to me. I'm not a bright, optimistic person that my activities show. I'm not even the person I say I am in my personal essay that I spent countless hours toiling with my blood, sweat and tears over, which is a cycle im sure will repeat multiple times. Are you kidding me? I'm 18 years old. You want me to write about who I am? I don't even know who I am...
There is this feeling I never felt before. Whenever I feel happy, whenever I ace a test or do something that brings my mood up, I feel a certain dread approach me. It's telling me that I shouldn't be relaxing, or playing games, or reading light novels, or watching anime, and it's telling me that I'm not allowed to feel happy. Don't forget to edit your personal statement! Did you finish your college list yet? Which topics are you writing for the UC essays again? Which college in this university are you applying for? Are you sure you want to apply to this school? What makes this school different than this? Are you going to retake that good sat score because you screwed up the essay? Are you going to miss registration deadlines like last time?
The game itself captures a bit of that experience. Not all of it. It's very light on story, compared to something like Pageant, and unlike Pageant you play as a self-insert with no specific personality. There are no other characters, either. People are only a component of the system, interacted with to raise or lower a number. No names or personalities exist in this game. There is no human interaction, only interaction with the system: work, study, work on apps, repeat. And there's no snippet of narrative with every choice you make to tell you what happens or how close you are to success. Time just silently advances.
The lack of feedback is one of the biggest differences from Pageant and PhD Simulator. In those games, you at least know what you're getting into, and how much work you need to put in to succeed. Here? College admissions processes are notoriously opaque. A person might get accepted at one college for what gets them rejected at another. You have no idea what you're supposed to do, what kind of person you're supposed to be, what kind of thing to focus on. Just grope around blindly and stress yourself out to the point of collapsing from exhaustion because you overwork yourself to the bone, not knowing how much to do and so trying to do everything at once, even if it's impossible.
There are mechanical criticisms you can make of this game. I don't like the approach the game takes towards "have a mental breakdown and be escorted to the mental asylum for a week" and "sleep for three days straight out of exhaustion". They're just punishments for letting your sanity/exhaustion drop to 0, and can happen over and over without any other consequences besides what's stated, which really lessens their impact. I would make it so that missing school from those events adds to your "School missed" counter. Or give multiple occurrences more severe consequences, or even have one be instant gameloss like in PhD Simulator. I also feel that more detailed narrative snippets would benefit the game, and it would be more impactful if it had a clearly defined protagonist who isn't just a featureless self-insert. But 31 Days hasn't been updated in years, so further change is unlikely.
Loads of people would find this game boring and lacking in detail. Without any individual payoff for each choice you make, you enter a pattern of mechanically clicking buttons with no idea what you're ultimately changing or if the result will be worth it. But that IS what elite college apps become for many people. Just look at all the Redditors who played and left comments saying "Sounds like real life".
Note: I've played this game twice and got rejected from all the HYPSMC colleges, both times. The second time I had a perfect 1600 SAT and one mental breakdown.
Your life has looked almost exactly the same for every day of the past however-many months. You wake up, do the bare minimum to keep yourself presentable, and then usually sit at your computer half-watching a man hundreds of miles away from you draw on his computer. Presumably these drawings are important. Sometimes, you even write down the words he says; this is generally considered to be a good use of your time.
You’ve found it hard to believe you’re a person, lately. You have a vague idea that people are supposed to go outside, see their friends, take walks in parks, et cetera. Instead you just sit at home, and go through the motions of study. Stagnating.
This is a highly localized story, though we never get any direct descriptions of the protagonist. But to me they clearly seemed to be a college student studying computer science/programming, stuck at home during Covid. The part about being forced to eat meat, despite their own wishes, could be taken literally (they're vegan and their family doesn't approve?) or a metaphor about having to do things you don't want to do, with society imposing its demands on you.
That said. I didn't really feel connected to the protagonist or their situation. Even though I've been in similar situations before. I think more specific details would help anchor this story in reality - we already know the protagonist's some kind of CS student, but what college do they go to and why, why are they studying CS, what is their family like, what are their hopes for the future, etc... Too much was left vague for me. In the end, I couldn't really take anything away from this story.
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