Reviews by Cerfeuil

Your life has looked almost exactly the same for every day of the past however-many months. You wake up, do the bare minimum to keep yourself presentable, and then usually sit at your computer half-watching a man hundreds of miles away from you draw on his computer. Presumably these drawings are important. Sometimes, you even write down the words he says; this is generally considered to be a good use of your time.

You’ve found it hard to believe you’re a person, lately. You have a vague idea that people are supposed to go outside, see their friends, take walks in parks, et cetera. Instead you just sit at home, and go through the motions of study. Stagnating.

[Review originally written October 2024, tag added in November 2024]

I stumbled on this game online and figured it should get an IFDB page. It's a simulation of what it's like to get a PhD, made by someone who actually has gotten a PhD in electrical engineering. Got reposted across social media a few times, which is how I found it.

Gameplay is vaguely Choicescript-esque. At any juncture, you have several options to choose from and can pick one. Doing so advances time by a month, and may cause a random event to happen. Your main stat is "Hope", which you have to prevent from falling to 0, since doing so instantly ends the game. There's not a whole lot of variety after your first few years, but managing resources and trying to balance the work-life grind is pretty fun.

I found it difficult and couldn't win after three tries. That might just be realistic. While I've never gotten close to attempting a PhD (thankfully), comments from the actual PhD students who've played the game made it seem pretty true to life.

I estimate the average run is in the ballpark of 10-20 minutes. It's not easy, but this fourth attempt has to be the one, right?

Edit: On my fourth attempt, I finally managed to obtain a PhD from PhD University with 3 papers under my belt (and no conference papers, those are a killer). It only took me 6 years and 5 months. Could be worse?

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.

The pale desert of this moon curves towards an empty horizon.

...

Clouds of gray dust swirl in your wake.

The wind is howling a language that you do not understand.

...

Moonlight is shining through the stained glass window, painting a rose of rainbows on the floor.

She is still waiting.

[Written August 2024 with minor edits November 2024.]

A strange game. I'd call it a mostly linear hypertext novel, short by novel standards but long by IF standards. Very ambitious, covering a wide range of perspectives and characters, and jumping between them with aplomb. You can make choices, but they don't seem to have much staying power, partly due to how the story's told.

The game has three acts, and each act retells one series of events. So you get more or less the same series of events, three times. I say "series of events" because it's several intertwining plotlines, involving several different characters who all do different things and eventually converge in a church during a possible apocalypse. I say "more or less" because there are variations in what happens, and whose perspectives we get, but the characters involved always stay the same.

Beyond that, I had a hard time discerning the specifics of the overall situation. There are certain lines, like stuff August says, that makes me think a literal time loop might be involved. Maybe these events are recurring over and over in an endless cycle, with only certain characters aware of it. If so, the ending seems to indicate a release of some kind from the eternal recurrence, with (Spoiler - click to show)the torrential, world-ending rain becoming a blizzard, and the characters sheltering in the church that got destroyed in the other two loops.

I liked the events and scenarios presented. The one about the cult of kids who live in an abandoned factory and listen to the voices of pigs was particularly striking to me. There's some compelling imagery in this story, both in specific lines like the ones I point out below, and the general aesthetics of certain scenes. Like when Nana points out the rain of blood to the bartender, and he momentarily looks up and sees it. I did, however, wish there was more meat to the worldbuilding. What is causing this apocalypse/cycle business? What kind of stuff is happening in the world where a bunch of children can just abandon their families and join a cult for rotting pig bodies that actually speak to them? The story takes place on Earth, or some version of it, but didn't really feel like it was rooted in any Earth I know.

The main barrier for me, though, was the surrealism and rapid perspective switching. It's done well in some cases and badly in others. There are occasions where it's used in ways I enjoyed, e.g. the transitions between perspectives in the first part are smooth and pretty clever. But once you get to the third part, there are so many perspectives flying out at you that I had only the vaguest idea of what was happening. Because of that, it was hard for me to really connect to any of the characters or the story overall.

I think this story would benefit a lot from more editing. A beta reader, at least. There are more than a few typos and grammatical errors. More editing might also improve the overall difficulty of understanding certain scenes. My least favorite parts were the prologues to each act and the ending. In the prologues, I could never really tell who was talking or why. It just felt like vaguely philosophical dialogue that didn't have anything to do with the story. In Act 3 and the ending, the tendency towards ambiguous perspective switching and surrealism was at its worst. Sure, there were a few moments in the ending where I did get what was going on, and could follow the perspective as it jumped from character to character, and those moments was amazing. But there were also sections where I ended up skimming because I couldn't figure it out.

That said, the writing has some really cool parts. Samples:

(I couldn't copy-paste these directly, so I typed them out by hand. Sorry for any errors.)

"Time being pulled apart, frayed, sewn together again backwards under the luminescent blinking of the ceiling lights."

"August's body floated downstream to some other part of town, or maybe to some other town entirely. Maybe towards a beach in a dry place where it never rained. Where sand drifted between cliffs along the horizon. Where everything was always warm."

"Trees that extend far up into the clouds, left to grow for centuries, their shadows so long they cross state lines on a sunny day."

Also, the full-color backgrounds were all drawn by the author and look amazing. (Fine, one specific background, the fiery one in the ending of Act 2, clashed with the text and made it hard to read. Maybe a partially-transparent black box beneath the text would help with that? But besides that, they're great and it's impressive that they were hand-made.) The backgrounds are combined with sound effects for each passage, and really contribute to immersion. Stuff like this feels highly cinematic, bringing IF a few steps closer to a full-color film, and I'm all here for it.

Playtime: ~80 minutes

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

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

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

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.