Reviews by Cerfeuil

You might expect a game about fascism to be angry and confrontational about why fascism is bad. This one is more indirect than that. I'm not even sure I ultimately got the point.

The title is certainly a reference to the Fascism - Off Topic thread that was created on intfiction.org in relation to the itch.io and Steam adult content bans, and the growing trend of internet censorship in the West. I caught that reference (and funnily enough, there's a movie poster featuring fictionalized versions of intfiction users that you can examine), but still felt too stupid to understand the game completely.

The game takes place in what seems to be a fascist US, in a subway in NYC. There are hints at a fascist takeover: the rundown subway, the ominous detail that there are "only a few people left riding".

The protagonist, from the x self response, seems to be onboard with the fascists: "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic." (Unless that was supposed to be irony, and I missed it, but the use of "clowns" feels too derogatory to be ironic. Or maybe that description is supposed to be from the narrator's perspective, and the protagonist is separate from the narrator, but the narrator seems to be an impartial spectator on every other occasion, so I doubt it.)

But the protagonist also has the option of interjecting in an argument between a couple on the subway to talk about how fascism works, indirectly accusing either the man or woman of fascism. The woman has cheated on the man; the man is confronting her not about that but about an Instagram post she made. Both are paranoid and controlling of the other. We don't know the content of the post, or the couple's political views.

If you interject (Spoiler - click to show)in a way that accuses the man, as I initially did, he fumes and asks "Is that what I am now? A fucking fascist?" This is the true ending; if you interject at other times, your interjection about fascism is off-topic and the two react with confusion or disdain. For me, the whole situation was ambiguous and hard to read. Possibly the entire game is a shaggy dog joke based on the title: (Spoiler - click to show)when I got the true ending, it told me "You made fascism on-topic. You lost!"

(Note: The version of the game I first played had the "true ending" notice appear for the wrong ending, while the actual, author-intended true ending was labeled a false ending. This contributed to my confusion, but it has now been fixed. I changed the above paragraph to reflect the fix.)

My major point of confusion: I'm not sure if the fascist protagonist is the right kind of person to talk about the evils of fascism to random people on the subway. I can't imagine the kind of person who would describe himself as "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car... white, male, patriotic", and then read a news article about fascism and tell two strangers on the subway that "the enemy ain't anyone. The enemy is uncertainty. Uncertainty and fear, that's fascism." (I'd sooner expect this kind of person to explain how leftists/islamists/illegal immigrants/etc are the enemy.) Maybe I'm missing the life experience required to comprehend this type of person. Is it supposed to be irony that the protagonist has read a news article about fascism and can spout eloquent talking points about it but can't comprehend that he currently lives under it? Is the point of the game that his words are empty and meaningless because he (presumably) supports the fascist government?

Another message of the game could be how life continues on as normal, no matter how awful the government becomes. The other people on the subway are browsing their phones or trying to get to Central Park, ignoring the argument, completely caught up in their own worlds. It speaks to the ability of humans to remain oblivious to what's going on around them, as long as their own lives can continue on unimpeded. No one can be bothered to get involved in strangers' problems. I did this the first time, too, hesitating to intervene until the man had left the subway car and the game informed me it was too late. --- But then, considering the lackluster response if you do intervene, and the protagonist's character in the first place, is intervention really a good thing? In this case, all you're really doing is getting involved in an argument between strangers. Are you actually helping people?

There's an element of helplessness in this game world, a world where awful things are happening far away and you can't see or prevent them. You can only deliver your off-topic monologue to strangers who are just as helpless as you. "maybe a bit something like... our own world currently, to be extremely heavy-handed about it."

No "fascism is bad" or "we must stop fascism"; just "fascism is off-topic".

This is a very short, very worthwhile horror story. There are no choices, but it has an impeccable atmosphere. Made for the Neo-Twiny jam in under 500 words, it takes barely any time to play and features awesome animations handdrawn by the creator. A hybrid of interactive fiction and a short horror animation you might find on Youtube or somesuch.

The story is surreal and open-ended in all the right ways. I recommend it.

From a comment I left on itch.io:

My theory about what happened is that (Spoiler - click to show)Malhar and Isabella were affected by some kind of anomalous effect, maybe the titular "Nihilist Syndrome", derived from a glitch in reality. The protagonist seems to be a computer scientist lecturing about computer memory, and the story places an emphasis on how contaminated data can result from improper memory allocation, causing incorrect behavior in the program, because the program is unable to distinguish between "real" and "false" data. To the computer, it's all real. "It'll run your program with those junk variables exactly as it's programmed to do, even if it destroys itself in the process." Malhar and Isabella were either real students who were contaminated and then erased by this junk data, or they were never real in the first place, solely products of junk data in reality that were then erased by some kind of reality garbage collector.

"Nothing about them was recognizable anymore-just a complete... deconstruction of the body..." By the time the universe gets to erasing them, they've been affected enough that people can no longer recognize them as human. It spreads to the area around them as well, affecting the cleanup process while their bodies are disposed of. People are incapable of reacting to their deaths, as if a mental block prevents them from acknowledging the glitch in reality. It also seems the glitch caused the professor's dwindling lecture attendance.

At the end, it's as if the students never existed. Either an antimemetic effect, or the cleanup made it so they retroactively never existed in the first place, except in the computer scientist's mind.

Reminds me of oldschool SCPs, in a good way.

I played this game more than a year ago, for Spring Thing 2024, but never got to publishing this review til I found it lying on my hard drive just now. Most of the review contains major spoilers due to the nature of the game, which I hid behind the spoiler block.

So you're part of a crime family and there's (Spoiler - click to show)a home intruder entering your apartment to kill you. Survive! It reminds me of a few other games I've seen on IFDB but haven't necessarily played. I know there's one where somebody enters your apartment with murderous intentions, and gameplay consists of setting up traps to kill them before they reach you.

This one is easier, since you can walk around the apartment while the intruder's there. Even after he enters the space you're in, you still get one turn to move somewhere else. So evading the guy is as easy as standing in one place and moving somewhere else if he comes over. The intruder is cleverly programmed, but I didn't dealing with him much of a challenge. Of course, then you have to deal with passively standing in a room while you listen to him take all your stuff, which is aggravating to say the least. Hey, you can't just take my phone and laptop. Those are mine! Sure, I couldn't figure out a way to unlock the phone (which is maddening, since there has to be a correct password hidden somewhere in the game and I couldn't find it) but that phone still belongs to me.

Another thing: part of me wonders if the intruder is real at all. There's the quote at the end of the game, for one:

"Your eyes snap open. The intruder has not yet opened the door. You slip out of bed, then head towards the counter.

You can do this."

This implies that it's all happening in the protagonist's imagination. Also the part where you have to survive the intrusion is told in future tense, not present, and seems to be what the protagonist is imagining will happen instead of what actually will happen. We don't see the intruder himself in-game. Sure, we imagine him killing us, but that's not the same as actually dying. It's why you get infinite attempts to survive.

I dunno. I discovered four endings: I where you get murdered, III where you wait it out evading the guy, IV where you attack him with a comforter so you can tie him up and interrogate him later, and V where you straight up kill him.

But my real question is what about Brookwood? Because get this: Brookwood is the person who set up this apartment for you, seemingly, and gave you the phone that you can't open because the password's incorrect, and gave you the safe that the intruder somehow knows the combination to. Is Brookwood pulling some double cross dagger-in-the-back schtick here? Because SOMEONE must've told the guy what the safe combination was, and there's only one other person mentioned in game who would know, I think. Of course, the other possibility is that the intruder doesn't exist and it's all imagination and paranoia. Who knows.

Anyway, it's a fun game. The introduction was really tedious, though. I get that it's supposed to capture the tedium of moving into a new apartment and dealing with chores, to some extent, but it took ages to get past and I didn't find it that helpful for teaching me the apartment's layout compared to the actually fun part of the game. That, plus the general ease of victory, are my main reasons for the three star rating.

It's still clear that an incredible amount of effort was put into this game, and the NPC behavior is exquisitely programmed.

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 film I'd never heard of), 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 is "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 small 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.