Reviews by Cerfeuil

Middle school bodies are like crappy NYC apartments: nothing seems to fit right, the smells never go away, and the general experience makes you wonder how growing up was ever considered a good idea.

Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don't get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)

You’ve been instructed to write a short essay on the topic “Should kids have homework?” for English class. While you are glad your teacher is interested in hearing about topics actually relevant to your life (unlike last week’s discussion climate change), you’re not quite sure where to start.

You reach down in the deep well of ideas swirling inside your brain. Homework good… but also bad?

You look where the sky should be only to see a river. You reach for the current. It's warm.

I’m going to sink. I always knew that, but I thought my boat would hold water. None of you know what it’s like to plant a seed by hand. You fix weights to ships, and you tell them the water's fine.

I’m an arduous process, arboreous labor. My bones are the dirt the ground came from, my trees the gift of broken hands. I want you to find the coastline. But none of you see it, none of you do.

It is empty. The world around you is creaks and bones, the hardwood floor a muted fretboard. No one else is around. The universe is quiet, a silent denouement for an inevitable ending. You see it on the skin, the distance. Your time is drawing to a close.

This story is great. I would go in with as few spoilers as possible. But another review I read before playing spoils the central concept, which is yes, (Spoiler - click to show)you go around eating various animal brains. Which makes them part of you and then you absorb what they know about the world, meaning even though you're limited to the same few areas the descriptions of those areas continuously grow in complexity and you get more and more options over time. Also, the things you eat have hilarious conversations with each other in your head. Fantastic.

Short, sweet, and highly recommended. The final puzzle did give me some trouble, but I blame that on me being bad at puzzles. Figured it out eventually.

Also, the control scheme is incredibly clever. Not only does it have story significance, but it's the perfect mix of a parser interface with mouse-based controls. I gotta admit one of the more annoying things about parser games to me is that you have to type out the commands, so you can't, say, eat while playing and just occasionally click with just one finger. But this solves the problem. It's perfect!

Excerpt:

(Spoiler - click to show)
"So, slice of brain, I wonder what kind of animal you were before you got here. I was a dog and the mouse had always been a mouse."
"I was something other than a slice of brain?"
"It seems to me that you must have been a fridge," suggests the mouse. "I ate the brain of a dog and Lucky appeared. After that, we opened and ate a fridge, and you appeared."
"I don't think it works like that," murmurs Lucky.

So you're this hapless guy, Tiel, who learns his partner Heron is breaking up with him. Luckily, he has what every jilted boyfriend wants: a pocket time machine! So he rewinds and tries again. And again. And again...

(Spoiler - click to show)From the first loop on, it's pretty clear that Tiel is a bit of a creep. This gets worse in one of the paths you can take, where you learn that he only got with Heron because of the time machine, which let him try to seduce Heron again and again until ey reacted the way he wanted em to. Not exactly the foundation for an equitable relationship. Here, the situation is similar to that first meeting: you can keep trying again and again until you hit upon the right combination of words and actions that will get Heron to stay with him. Or you can actually make Tiel throw up his hands and give up, acknowledging that he's being a manipulative bastard, and destroy the time machine.

That option is clearly the most moral one, but from Heron's perspective it's interesting, because none of that ever really happened, did it? Heron doesn't remember anything you do to em before a reset. So from Heron's perspective, the ending where Tiel convinces em to stay is just - "dang, my boyfriend suddenly turned a new leaf the day I was thinking about breaking up with him, maybe this can work after all".

And Tiel thinks it can, but personally I don't think it will. There are some pretty dark implications that come with turning back time to get a better result for yourself in a relationship. If Tiel does something awful to Heron in the future, can he just turn back time and be like "aw gee shucks that didn't happen" and get away with it scot-free? (I read a story a while ago that involved an abuser who could manipulate memories, so he could do anything to his boyfriend, make him forget about it afterwards, and pretend they lived a happy life together. It didn't end well.)

Part of me wishes the story leaned more into the implications, but Ending 1 is fine as it is, too. Tiel still thinks of himself as a good person, and resolves not to hurt Heron despite the fact that he's still the one with the time machine and the desire to manipulate people by using it. Not a great combo.

Anyway, fun story, and easier to understand than Primer.

Playtime: ~10 min

I played this game a while ago and figured I might as well write something for the review-a-thon event. For me it's hard to really rate and review most Neo Twiny games, since they have a 500 word limit, so usually you can't say too much on the game itself without going into tangents and eventually rambling on for paragraphs about nothing relevant in particular. I might do some of that.

I liked this game. Somewhere the author said they liked Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, a book I also really like, and I found myself thinking about Annihilation while playing. Mostly for the flavor of eldritch horror. In Annihilation, a team of scientists travel into a wilderness overtaken by an eldritch force, lush with strange and winderful lifeforms; here, the entity that accosts the protagonist's spacecraft is described as "beautiful and terrible and surreal". The key is that in both stories, the horror isn't horrific at all but more something unknown, difficult to understand, totally outside the landscape of human knowledge. To understand it would be to cease being human. That kind of deal.

But there seems to be no actual malice on the entity's part. It doesn't rip people apart or anything. Of the deaths it causes in this story, two are from suicide and two are from crew members fighting over whether they should let it in. (Spoiler - click to show)This is actually what you do in one of the game's three endings: you open the door to let that thing in, whatever it is, and the story ends with the understanding that the protagonist will never see Earth again.

There are two other endings, but that last one is my favorite. I guess it's a flavor of story I like. It's the whole leap of faith thing, accepting the unknown. To me, the story is about acceptance. The beauty of reaching out to the thing that's destroyed you, because you need to understand. Alien connection. Humanity's ultimate insignificance in the universe. Ascension in a way that involves losing everything, but you do it because you're compelled to make contact with a higher form of existence. Or something like that. I could go on.

I don't know how much of that is implicit in the game and how much is just me reading stuff I like into what's a pretty short story, all things considered. In Annihilation, people don't really die. They're transformed. It could be the same here, too, or maybe the ending where you let it in just ends with an unceremonious death for the protagonist as she's instantly killed. Hard to say. But anyway, cool stuff.

I also have to mention the great CSS. Minimalistic but hits all the right notes.

Playtime: ~5 min

It's been a while since I played; this review is based on an unfinished one I wrote back during Ectocomp when I'd just played the game. I was really fond, and I'm still amazed the authors managed to make it in four hours. There's a lot going on here. Granted, I've never used Inform so I don't know how easy these tricks were to pull off, but from the complexity of some, I wanna say "not easy at all".

It's a solid game. There's a map system and a trap system and adventurers who navigate your map/trap system who you must stymie, lest they steal your precious magical artifact! The rooms are are all charming and inventive (and even more excellent with the ALLTEXT option!). The central puzzle itself was really neat. It took me four tries to figure out, but was highly satisfying to solve.

The concept, where you're a monster who has to stop those pesky adventurers from raiding your home instead of the other way around, is also a good twist on your typical dungeon fantasy plot. As far as parser games go, this is a really unique one. I also love that detail where the strange letter spellings are actually based on standards for writing out ancient Mesopotamian or something like that. The most alien things are actually just relics of a distant human civilization. Pretty cool.

Playtime: ~30 min

I know there's a lot of grad school lit theory about the significance of words and images and signifiers and stuff, but I have no direct experience with that so I can only vaguely gesture at it from afar. Sad. But it's the first thing I thought of with this game.

The concept is pretty unique: it's a Twine game made by a sentient word that's taken over your body, written to you, the player. And word means word, as in a series of letters (or strokes, characters, etc? but this is in English so I'm assuming letters) representing an idea. We never find out what idea or what word the narrator actually is, so there's a layer of abstraction there. You could say the narrator is more the concept of a word than an actual word, I mean, obviously real words can't write Twine games and take over people's bodies and so on. But that's basic suspension of disbelief, so anyway.

A lot of the story is musing on meaning and the difference between words and images, the significance of both in interactive fiction, and stuff like that. There's some fun references to typography ("...I felt like serifs were coming out of me -- it's sweat. Sweating is a terrifying experience"), and emphasis placed on how limited and inadequate words are for communication, compared to actually living life and experiencing things directly. The word suffers from a bit of sensory overload over all the possibilities available to a human body and wonders how writers can just gloss over details like the glow of a lightbulb ("I can't believe writers don't talk about these magical devices forever"). Which is ironic, of course, because the game itself is entirely text with no images or extra stylings or anything of the sort. It was made for the Bare-Bones Jam, where the lack of extra formatting was a requirement. Pretty good use of the limitation, I think.

The in-story explanation for why the styling is so bare-bones is that the word didn't have time to learn about styling Twine. There's some nice details that come from the word being very honest about its newbie status, like the desk passage it just forgot to write about: "Oh shoot, I was so busy writing the game that I forgot to set up this node until I started to test it..." or the remark about how it'd be nicer if the Harlowe documentation was easier to read. The word's personality comes through pretty strong in this story, despite its relatively short wordcount. Our narrator is humble, awed at the richness of human existence, and endearing in an "aw shucks" way. I liked it.

The word expresses a strong belief in the superiority of images over text, and says an ideal world would contain no text, only images. Even the law would be expressed in images only. It's clearly a comedic kind of opinion you're meant to disagree with, and there's an especially funny part where the word discovers something called the "Top 50 Interactive Fiction" list and gets ticked off that all these games have so many words in them. "Unbelievable!"

But in the end there's still an acknowledgement that words are communiciation, and like any form of communication they can reach someone and affect them deeply. Sure, there are things you can do with images and multimedia that words could never manage, but the converse is also true. It's why we're here.

Some other stuff:

1 - The "you" in the story, i.e. the human whose body gets taken over, isn't a generic AFGNCAAP protagonist but a specific person with their own hobbies and so on. The bookshelf specifically made me wonder if the human is based on the author specifically, since it has the kind of books I feel like they'd own. You can look through each one and get commentary: there's manga, an international relations textbook, and also Pale Fire is in there. Which is really funny. Like finding a metafictional cherry hidden in your metafictional cake.

2 - I appreciate that we get to try out dozens of clothes articles from the dresser. Each one has detailed descriptions of how the word reacts, too. Pretty fun.

I would probably have more to say on this matter if I'd read all that stuff about signifiers. Unfortunately, I haven't.

Playtime: ~10 min

A bizarre and beautiful game. As given by the description, you are in purgatory after having apparently... died? But the nature of your death, or even your life, doesn't matter much. It's not that kind of story. Instead of learning about who you were and what you've left behind or that stuff you often see in those "I died and now must come to terms with my existence" stories, you're just wandering around a strange bird park and having strange encounters with strange people. At the end of it all, you... transcend? It's not entirely clear.

This one Youtuber made a video about how game journalists will describe every single game as a combination of some other game, and I think about that every time I tell myself "this thing is just like that thing plus that other thing", but I'll do it here anyway. Provizora Parko is a bit like You are Standing at a Crossroads meets Beautiful Dreamer. Like You Are Standing at a Crossroads, it has a bizarre purgatorial world, a sense of unease and "how do I get out of this?", questions answered only by more questions, and many allegorical happenings. But the overall tone and ending are far more lighthearted, which brings me to the second comparison. It shares with Beautiful Dreamer a strong sense of whimsy and a world that feels consistent in a strange way, adhering to a set of unknown rules, even if those rules aren't at all explained. And both have strong writing.

Is it that similar to either of those games? Not really. But I'd recommend them if you liked this one. Play more games, they're fun.

Time to finish: ~10 min

Quote:

Every evening, a stork would peer into a lake looking for fish and shrimp to eat. One night, under the full moon, her shadow spoke to her from the bottom of the lake. “Come join me at the bottom of the lake. But you must pluck out your eyes first. You will not need them any longer.” So the stork plucked out her eyes and passed into the world beneath the surface. Only a few drops of blood remained on the water, but soon they, too, disappeared.

You're a 26-year-old NEET who starts hearing strange music in the house where you've been living depressed and friendless for many years. Shortly after, you find a lens that lets you see messages from extradimensional entities when you look through it. Things progress from there...

Absolutely love the surreal, disturbing atmosphere. Was a bit disappointed that the nameless entities you encounter basically boil down to (Spoiler - click to show)'things that kill everyone' in the end, though. I wanted something weirder to happen, and that was a letdown. Oh well.

Despite the disappointment of the ending, there's a lot of stuff in this game to be stunned by and incredible detail put into things. Besides the odd lens, there's also the black-and-white music video on the computer, the interactive fridge magnets, the interactive Walkman, the interactive piano... Loads of cool point-and-click interactivity here. Then there's the writing itself - the person you play as, Linus, has a wry sense of despair. Their (his?) "yeah whatever" response to all the weird stuff that happens really sells the vibe. And the writing's great. Lots of pithy, darkly ironic one-liners.

Excerpts:

- On a waste bin in the laundry room: "It's a graveyard for socks with holes in them and socks that have lost their twins. It's a good thing we don't treat humans the same way."
- On entering the kitchen: "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for the rest of his life. Give him a fridge, he'll become sedentary, forget his survival instinct, and be satisfied eating parmersan straight from the package."
- On coloring books: "These are my old coloring books. My mother kept them all, because she thought it was impressive that I managed to stay within the frame when coloring. My only talent: I never go overboard."
- On a window: "The glass has been fitted for over a year, but the frame has never been installed. It's a window that can't be opened. Just like my life."

If any of that resonates with you, go do yourself a favor and play this game!

Playtime: ~20 minutes

[Review initially written January 2024, edited April 2024]

I'm fascinated by the perspective switching in this one. It takes the seed and really puts it to good use. You get to see a heated, passive-aggressive confrontation between two couples, and man there's so much tension simmering beneath the surface even though their words to each other are perfectly cordial. Jumping from character to character as the argument progresses is jarring, but also a great way to capture the chaotic back-and-forth of the conversation.

I can't help but think this would be a great writing exercise - a way to illustrate the differences in perspective and how they can vary from person to person. But it's not just about perspective, it's about diving into each character's head and seeing what they want and like and dislike. It's a pleasant kind of whiplash and it really makes you feel like you're seeing the situation from four dimensions (everything at once!). Replayed a bunch of times.

Here's my DND story: The longest campaign I've been in ended after two sessions, but not before my character broke both legs jumping off a cliff and had to be carried around in a bag of holding for the rest of the game. I've done a few other oneshots, but nothing much. I've still been exposed to it enough to be familiar with the basic rules. Also, illithids are cool. In Baldur's Gate 3 that new DND game that everyone was raving about there are illithids and you get an illithid tadpole inside your brain and you can romance one and what was I saying again?

Anyway, so this game is heavily remniscient of my own DND experience. DND is complicated. There's all kinds of rules for combat and spells and levels and so on, and it can easily get overwhelming. When I played, sometimes one player's combat turn would take ten minutes while everyone else (myself included) browsed their phones until the rules and rolls finally got hashed out. Everyone was new to the game, including the DM, which didn't help. It's really not that beginner-friendly.

We still had fun, and there were some hilarious moments, but sometimes the tedium outweighed the fun. For not entirely unrelated reasons, I haven't done any kind of TTRPG in a long time.

Our main character at least has her girlfriend Rachel to help her out. Rachel can go a bit too far with the backseat DMing sometimes, but it's nothing too bad. I think the stuff you deal with in the game is mostly par for the course (and much better than what I've heard of on r/rpghorrorstories - now there's a subreddit to go to if you want to burn some time). Sure it has a supernatural bent to it, but players who talk out of character or get into silly arguments or make decisions the DM wasn't preparing for is just most DND sessions, in my limited experience. You have to roll with the punches. Which is what I ended up doing in my playthrough, and despite everything that went on we did make it to the end with some time to spare. (Side note, four hours seems pretty long for a first-time DND game, but I guess it makes sense if you want to play a oneshot all the way through and have someone more experienced to guide you. I personally feel like I'd be bored to death by the end, but this group of players is probably better than my group.)

I do have some UI quibbles that I think could've made the game a smoother experience: you're given info about the characters and the characters' characters (meta!) at the start of the game, but after that you can't really reference the info again, and it can be hard to remember it all. I never figured out exactly what the "Look around the table to see how everyone is doing" thing does - I think it shows you how distracted everyone is, but it's hard to check exactly since it only gives out textual descriptions. I got in the habit of barely checking it since the descriptions often don't change from one "turn" to the next. Also, is the general Distraction meter just for you, or is it for the whole table? If it's just for you, does every character have their own Distraction meter? But only yours is directly visible? Questions I wasn't totally sure about the answers to. Fun game overall, though.