Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

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.