Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

Not only does this game have illustrations, it also has sound design! And the illustrations are great. Very moody black-and-white images, surreal and calming. I was expecting it to be less polished than it was based on the two existing reviews, but it played well and looked great.

You play as a pony who sails around the Lucidious Sea, delivering letters. Light fantasy/magical realism setting, some cool worldbuilding details. Pretty sure it's My Little Pony inspired, based on the artstyle, but there are no references to the show as far as I could tell. The biggest similarity is that everyone just happens to be a pony.

Gameplay is mainly pick one of five directions to sail in, experience a random event, then repeat. Random events range from island sightings to full on battles with dream apparaitions. Yes, this game has a battle system in it. You fight using juju charms and mail, and as you deliver more letters, you can use them as extra tools in your arsenal. It's not very difficult, since you can heal whenever and I never came close to dying though enemies can attack you while you heal. But it's creative for sure -- fighting with oneiromancy and envelopes, sign me up.

My main criticism is that the random events get repetitive after a while. I think sailing in one direction for long enough takes you to an island where you can deliver a letter to a recipient. You have five letters to deliver, and each gives you a new mail weapon, and delivering them all wins the game. But getting to each recipient take a lot of sailing, and you end up seeing the same things over and over again. I wish the game was shorter, and had more battles and less repetitions of the same random events. They're fun the first time, but after a while you get tired and just start clicking through. The ending isn't worth it either, it's basically "Congrats you beat the game, play again?" with no sense of resolution.

Decent game still, worth playing. I wouldn't play to the end, though. Just stop when it starts repeating itself.

Playtime: around 35 min

This game takes both too much and too little from Skulljhabit. It copies the mechanics without copying over why the mechanics worked so well in the context of Skulljhabit's setting, so it removes their narrative thrust and renders it all rather pointless. Unfortunately, I got bored of the grind and never finished it. So don't trust this review, apparently the game expands and lets you do other things later on. But the part I played didn't interest me.

In Skulljhabit the arbitrariness of your task is part of the point. There's no apparent reason for you to be shoveling skulls into a giant skull pit. You're doing it because you've been told to by an exterior bureaucratic force and you have no choice but to obey their edicts. In this game you're in a library trying to make a game (very meta) based on Porpentine's work, and the crucial detail to me is that you're here of your own volition and this is something you want to do. Completely different context. One way this game undercuts itself with its premise.

This game's setting is much more abstract. In the library you read about Porpentine and use the 'words' you get, measured in numbers, to purchase your game's 'body parts' one by one. It has an allegorical feel but the allegory doesn't work for me. Maybe because this abstract process of reading books to grind up your wordcount to buy body parts bears no resemblance to the process of actually making a game, in any sense. It focuses too much on the reading, not on the writing, and there's something soulless about how it depicts the reading. Reading becomes grinding for currency so you can purchase things. You're "reading" about Porpentine but as far as I'm aware you don't see a single word of anything she's written, you just click the 'read' button and get a random number of words to add to your wordcount, and then you click it again, and again and again, until you get tired and go to sleep. In Skulljhabit this worked for shoveling skulls because it's meant to be a thankless, tedious task. But I think reading, especially reading about an author you admire, should be a respite and not framed as part of the daily grind.

This is my main complaint with the game really, I gave up on it so I'm not sure if it gets better. The gameplay I saw wasn't very interesting. Mostly grinding, and there's a few typos. Reading isn't the only thing you can do, there's a mountain to climb for example, but that mountain is taken almost directly from Skulljhabit and in my opinion the modifications made by the author make it worse. Which describes my impression of the game pretty well: Skulljhabit but worse. Play Skulljhabit, it's pretty fun.

This is the kind of Twine game I expect to find on Itch. It's more interactive short story than game, and there are no choices to be made. You just click through the passages. The story features a vaguely queer protagonist in a dying town, with allusions to homophobia and other abuses that are, for the most part, only described obliquely. In short, it fits with the genre.

But the writing is decent, and the presentation is beyond stunning. Every passage is accompanied by excellent pixel art, and the glitchy passage-to-passage transition looks fantastic. The music is good too, haunting ambient chords that set the mood well.

Playtime: about 10 minutes. The author's site is down, so you'll have to play the game on Itch.