Reviews by Cerfeuil
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Infinite Utopian Dreamland Afterlife, February 10, 2025After you die, if your coffin isn't sealed all around with pewter nails, you'll seep down through the soil. Thinner than mist, you'll drain past root, worm, and stone, through the spigot, and into Lozengy.
My transcript, with commentary, is linked. I played for more than an hour and got both endings.
Of the Shufflecomp games I played this year, this was one of my favorites. I consider it inordinately charming. The puzzles were a little difficult, though others didn't seem to have any issues with them, so I guess I'm just not great at catching details. There is also some underimplementation, but that's to be expected from a small comp game.
What I really adore about this one is the setting. It's one of those surreal fantasy settings where there are no true problems in the world. In real life you can turn on the news and hear stories about the most godawful thing possible, but Lozengy is beautiful in an alien way because it's so far removed from humanity and all its issues. It's dreamlike and bursting with endless new wonders. It's somewhere not here, somewhere so far from here that it doesn't even know where "here" is, and it doesn't need to care.
The setting also happens to be an afterlife. I say "an" and not "the" because the opening implies there are other afterlives, alternative possibilities for the soul after you die in this universe. But the afterlife part is relevant to the gameplay, which consists of doing tasks to care for this interstitial space people can find themselves in when they die. A wonderful realm where the grass is purple and the water hums and cake can be made out of thin air.
I've read many stories with interesting and unique spins on the afterlife. I found most of them on Reddit's r/writingprompts years ago, through prompts like New arrivals in eternal Hell may choose either of the following: a small wooden spoon, or a 100-trillion year vacation in Heaven., and You have died. You walk up a huge spiral staircase and it takes you a thousand years to reach the top. You’re exhausted, but to your surprise you are greeted with the pearly gates, except they’re completely rusted over. A sign reads “Welcome to Heaven, Population: 1” and When someone dies, they go to a platform where you can choose to move in to the afterlife, not knowing whether you will go to heaven or hell. You meet someone who has stood there for millenia, trying to decide if they should go. For that last one, the top response was a story where actually everyone went to Heaven but nobody knew that, so people who knew they'd done the wrong thing and sincerely believed they'd go to Hell were punished by being locked out of Heaven forever since they were too scared to open the door. ("Isn't that unfair to people who believe they did the right or wrong thing when they didn't?" Sure, but it was a random Reddit comment I read years ago, I'm just relaying it because I thought it was interesting.)
That's a digression and not really relevant to the game, except as an example of how stories about afterlives often go. Often you get parables with some kind of sly moral. This story isn't like that at all, it's more an exploration of a fantastical world that is part of a greater, all-encompassing universal order. There is a Heaven in this world, but no Hell, not even an interstitial Hell like the one in the story I described above. The one soul you guide to Choirmount was a killer in his past life, but when it's his time to join, he is welcomed with open arms. It seems that everything is forgiven. I think there's something beautiful about that, a world with no eternal punishment and no fiery gates, no torture and brimstone. Also a world without the cold annihilation of scientific atheism, not a dreamless oblivion but only eternal love for everyone... Now, maybe I'm projecting. Who knows. Anolelona does call Choirmount a "dead end", but they end up where they want in the end, so it's plausible that Choirmount simply isn't for them. At any rate, I personally wouldn't mind joining some kind of eternal blissful chorus. It feels far preferable to the real world.
I might compare this game to another game about the afterlife I've played, Provizora Parko, and Beautiful Dreamer, which I thought Provizora Parko resembled in certain small ways. An aura of surreal whimsy unites all three. But this one takes the cake (the magical infinite free cake) for me in terms of how much I would love to sink into the setting and live there forever, following the protagonist and Anolelona in their adventures through a world where you can explore eternity to your heart's content...
As the ending says: (Spoiler - click to show)"I'm coming down!" you cry. There is no answer, not yet, but there is plenty of time for that, so much time, all the time.
Also compare Joel G's ENA animations, though they're twice as surreal and come with a general feeling of threat humming along in the background, and the many whimsical children's books I read in elementary school, like The Phantom Tollbooth.
Really, it's a marvelous thing.
Oh, and I guess the main character and Anolelona are abandoning their duties by skiving off to explore the infinite realms of magic instead, but it seems like this afterlife can mostly run itself. At the least, the workload seems small enough that Aowma could probably handle it on her own. Is that wishful thinking? Maybe, but there's no evidence against it, right?
Worryingly, it appears this game is no longer playable since Qiaobooks, the creator company, has gone out of business. The IF archive link only gives me an infinite loading screen. Waited several minutes and tried multiple browsers, but no dice.
The IFDB description says "former commercial", which is amazing because I wouldn't pay for this in a million years. It's a very primitive resource management parser game. Now, there can be good resource management parser games like Olivia's Orphanoirium, but this isn't it. Gameplay consists of buying and selling goods at different cities to make a profit, with some bells and whistles attached, but not many. Quickly it became repetitive and boring, in part due to the lack of descriptions for anything I was doing. Nothing but numbers and barebones text. The concept is interesting, but this hardly does a good job of making you really feel like an 1800s merchant in Asia. Stopped playing after less than 20 minutes.
I found this game while looking for games about (Spoiler - click to show)insects, body horror, infestation, that kind of thing. So the story, which some other reviews call a mystery plot, was obvious to me from the get-go. I found it solid and entertainingly told. Also not very original, but who needs originality when you've got (Spoiler - click to show)INSECT PARASITES?! That burrow under your skin and live inside you?!
Clears throat.
Anyway. What this game really is missing is well-clued puzzles. Good puzzles, really. I'm the exception among this game's existing reviewers on IFDB in that I thought the puzzles weren't very well done and ran into guess-the-verb errors a few times. In particular, I got stuck because I kept trying to (Spoiler - click to show)"loosen screws with butterknife" instead of "loosen painting with butterknife"... even though the painting is secured to the wall by the screws.
The navigation is also somewhat confusing. (Spoiler - click to show)You start outside the house, then go inside the house, and in classic fashion the door magically locks behind you. Alright. But what's unintuitive and underclued is that you'll eventually need to go outside the house by opening the bathroom window and going down a tree. Then you won't be able to get back in because of the magically locked front door, so you'll need to go east of the van into the woods, navigate a rather boring maze, and then you end up back in the cemetary. The process is made easier after you find Daisy and get her key, which works on the front door, but boy howdy is it annoying at first.
The endgame in general I found really unintuitive, to the point where I had to read the actual source code of this game to figure out what I was supposed to do. Thankfully the source code is available, otherwise I'd never have beaten this. But I've never played the game that this game is apparently based on, so some of the commands were just plain nonsensical. (Spoiler - click to show)How was I supposed to know to "push cabinet" in the kitchen? And "rub algae with towel" in the moist basement, to reveal the brick, was unintuitive for me. And don't even get me started on "open crypt with shovel" to "take slime" , or "pour gasoline on self", which I had to look at the source code to figure out. Maybe it's because I don't play enough oldschool parsers. I dunno.
The fact that this game is based on another, older one also explains the large number of items lying around that pretty much don't do anything. The pitcher or dagger, for example. I didn't like having those red herrings around and taking up space in my inventory.
But since there's still an interesting story hidden underneath all this, here's a walkthrough so that you, if anyone's even reading this, don't have to suffer like I did.
(Spoiler - click to show)
in
open door
n
w
open cabinet
take matches
x sink
take butterknife
e
read note
n
take candle
light candle
l
look under rug
take keys
s
e
read second note
l
open door
w
up
w
w
n
read third note
s
e
e
n
n
n
x painting
loosen painting with butterknife
take painting
press button
n
read book
s
s
s
up
e
x chest
open chest
look in chest
l
x camera
push camera west
switch on camera
take sledgehammer
down
n
n
e
x body
take towel
open window
e
down
s
unlock van
open van
in
take gasoline
x monitor
out
e
n
n
w
w
take shovel
open door with shovel
in
x slime
touch slime
x self
out
open gate
s
e
w
w
up
n
up
open trap door
climb ladder
x daisy
talk to daisy
z
z
l
take key
read fourth note
down
s
down
w
push cabinet
w
down
s
x flower
smell flower
take flower
rub algae with towel
take brick
unlock keyhole
down
down
n
x joe
talk to joe
z
z
throw flower at joe
hit joe with sledgehammer
x seal
hit seal with sledgehammer
i
blow out candle
drop all
l
take matches
pour gasoline on self
drop gasoline can
n
x queen
light matches
YOU WIN!
For bonus points (read: a !FUN! ending), try going in without the gasoline. Or lighting the gasoline can directly.
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!
Well, we all know how that's going to go for our poor protagonist...
Except we don't. Because all of a sudden, you get... ROMANCE options?! Yes, this is a bit of a dating sim. The heart on the cover might've spoiled that for you, but it didn't sink in for me until I saw the "dating" options and thought, oh.
So this is a quite bizarre game. It looks like horror on the surface, but the structure and some writing foibles scream "dating sim", even though the dating activities are less "traditional candlelight dinner" and more "run away screaming while pursued". But the mixture works better than you'd expect for a four-hour creation.
I'll be honest. I would play this if it was full-length. With great enthusiasm, even.
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.
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.
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