Reviews by Cerfeuil
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I was recommended this game because it has parasites in it. I love parasites. Now, the implementation is a bit finicky because it's a SpeedIF, and I got stuck early on and had to use David Welbourn's walkthrough. (Where would we be without him?) Similarly, there's a few grammatical/spelling errors floating around. But the main draw of !parasites! is still there.
She has become thin this past weeks, as the parasites ate her brain. Her skin is shimmering light blue, and sometimes you can see hints of their movements under her skin. You barely see the woman whose touch once made you shudder, whom you held and whose breathing you learnt to listen to when you couldn't sleep. Monsters are eating her, and she has become one herself.
Look at that. Beautiful, right?
I would heartily recommend this game for parasite fans.
Don't remember how I got this in my bookmarks. Maybe Twitter. Anyway, this can barely be called a game, since it's unfinished. There's only two things you can really interact with, and one NPC, the door, who doesn't even have all its dialogue written out. Some of it is just "DIALOG".
Why bother rating it and putting it on IFDB, then? Because this has one of the most spectacular interfaces of any Twine game I've ever played. Period. The person who made it is a professional web designer, and it shows. This is a three-dimensional escape room, IN TWINE, where you can choose which direction you face at any given moment (north/south/east/west) and the room will rotate as you face that direction. I imagine it's all done with CSS effects behind the scenes, and the end result is unbelievably cool. The flashing GIFs are cool too. Shame there's no substance to it. Not even an ending. You tell the door you'll fight it if it doesn't let you out of the room, and you get an unfinished COMBAT prompt, and that's all there is.
Fine, I lied, there's also a dev page that lets you access unfinished parts of other locations. Some interesting ideas there, but nothing much. Most of the paths kick you out to a placeholder featureless room.
In its current state, the game is just a tech demo. It seems like the creator lost motivation to work on it, which is why it was published in this state. Unfortunate.
This game had a cult following at some point, which is how I heard about it. Nowadays the subreddit is pretty dead. I blame this on the game, which is really a website with hundreds of pages to explore, being difficult to parse and therefore inaccessible to newcomers.
The website has an odd and intentionally cryptic storyline, where you are a Probe exploring Terminal 00, part of a network of Terminals whose goal is to "Open the Gate". This goal is stymied by attacks from something called the CoS. If that doesn't make much sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to me, either. There are several pages that explain the lore farther, most of which can be accessed from the Assistance page, but don't expect clarity.
I think surreal and cryptic storylines definitely can work under certain circumstances, but the writing here just isn't very good, and there's too much nonsense being thrown around for me to really understand any part of it. Combine this with the fact that some webpages are locked behind cryptographic puzzles and I really don't know what's going on. Not only that, but I'm not motivated to find out what's going on. I'd explore a bit, dig deeper if it interests you, and leave if it doesn't.
Why three stars despite this? Because the website looks mind-bogglingly cool. Awesome glitchy aesthetic and a lot of unique visuals. Also music. Downside is that the music and visuals take a while to load, but they're worth looking at for a few minutes.
I voted playtime to be half an hour, but it depends on how much time you're willing to spend on this. I can see someone using hours of their life to decode the messages. I can also see someone looking around, getting bored, and leaving within a few minutes. It depends. I personally can't imagine spending too much time here, though.
When the world ended, life became an unpleasant costume. You have only ever wanted to gift it to something else, but it is not so easy now.
Instead you lie here, reduced to nothing.
I heard about this game because it was entered into the 2024 Independent Games Festival, and there were a few mentions of that on social media. It's a relatively short browser text adventure with excellent aesthetics and an intriguing setting. The beginning is a purposeful riff on A Dark Room, a short melancholic prologue, but it soon opens up in spectacular fashion. The rest is an exploration game that reminded me of Porpentine and other surreal IF I've played.
The music, sparse visuals and sleek CSS/JS create a fascinating UI. One log in the middle shows everything you've done, while objects to the side can be clicked on and interacted with. Connections, also hovering to the side, will take you to a new location when clicked. Everything is strategically placed to make it feel like you're truly walking around this decaying world while you scroll up and down.
The writing style has the same conservation of detail you find in games like their angelical understanding. Stark, minimalist sentences sketching out a surreal landscape, mentioning strange facts and never elaborating upon them. You get the sense of a far larger world beyond the game's confines, whose full history will never be explained.
Setting also gives me that Dark Souls/Porpentine feeling. It's a post-apocalyptic world defined by ruin: we've got a poison swamp and abandoned buildings and wind blowing through endless wastelands, outlined in neon pink and green against a dark background. The randomly-generated names for the protagonist and their monsters have Dark Souls boss vibes. Hallowed Exile, anyone? Weeping Knight? But what really makes the writing tick is a pervasive melancholy and isolation that comes across with each location, a longing for a world so long gone it's been forgotten in every way that matters. But it must have been better than this.
Individually, the sentences are just okay (there are a few comma splices). But combined with the music and gameplay, they shine.
There's also the monsters, part of the game's core conceit. They're represented as collections of squares that float around the screen, following you wherever you go. Clicking one opens an interface that lets you feed and further interact with it. I found myself not directly focused on them, more interested in exploring the setting, but I was attached to their little sound effects and the occasional notifications you get about them sleeping and releasing waste and so on. You can feed them, which is the primary purpose of the items you collect as you wander around. They are companions in the vast solitude of post-apocalyptic life. And they are supposed to, eventually, die.
I'd like to emphasize "supposed to". My main problem with this game is long before that happens, you run out of things to do. The description says "Travel with and care for small creatures, exploring an alienating, nostalgic world until the inevitable end of those creatures’ lives", and you do travel with and care for the creatures, but before any of them died I had already discovered everything there was to discover in the world. The process of discovery was great, and it's not a small game, so it took me about twenty minutes and maybe forty (?) locations to see everything. But nothing really changes in a location after you go there the first time.
Yeah, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a robed figure who can give you extra pets if you talk to them in the town and then swamp, but I could only find them once and never again. After that, it was just wandering around places I'd already been, looking for other new things and not finding them. Possibly I missed some important location or other, but I spent a while double-checking places I'd already been, and going through all the connections between places, so I don't think so.
I don't know how long creatures are supposed to live. Each of mine had a number slowly counting down from 100, which I assume is lifespan. Here's the thing: by the time I got bored and decided to end my game, the lowest lifespan counter I could see was still at, what, 70? The lifespan needs to be greatly reduced, or the number of things to do in the game greatly increased. Probably both. Alternatively, I would appreciate some kind of proper ending that could be discovered by exploring the game world and raising your monsters right, since I was looking for one but never found anything that felt satisfying. A part of me expected them to evolve based on how you feed them, but that never happens.
To the game's benefit, it does include one ending, which is how I terminated my playthrough. I wouldn't call it the satisfying ending I want, because (Spoiler - click to show)there is no resolution. Just ran out of things to do and decided to enter the wasteland and "forget myself", i.e. die, with my two creatures still around me. I could've beelined to that location and done that from the start, and it wouldn't have changed anything. It felt unsatisfactory to me. In some ways it's consistent with the themes of decay and a longing for something so far gone it can never be restored, but it didn't tie into anything I had done. And the prelude to that ending, wandering a world devoid of secrets because you've already discovered them all, wasn't fun and really took away from the joy of earlier gameplay. It doesn't help that some items in certain places respawn when I think they shouldn't, such as (Spoiler - click to show)the bones in the decaying hut. That feels like a genuine bug.
Despite the game's flaws, I'd still recommend it to people who like the aesthetics of Dark Souls and post-apocalyptic ruins. See the sights, you know?
One final note. The game has an account creation feature, and according to the itch.io page, apparently server-based multiplayer support. I didn't notice anything multiplayer when I was playing, but it's likely that nobody was playing at the same time as me, since this game is basically unknown. I don't know what effect multiple people playing at the same time would have, if any. It's possible that the server-based multiplayer support is just a way to easily save your progress. I made an account, but played through the game in one sitting so there was ultimately no need for it, and the ending I chose deleted my account anyway.
The itch.io page also says the game will get future updates, so maybe the game will be improved in the future. It'd be nice if we got more endings and more ways to interact with the monsters.
Quotes:
THE SHADOW UNDER THE LONG BRIDGE: A small cove rests in the shadow of the bridge. Discarded things gather here.
A weeping beast crouches on the edge of the rocks with what limbs he has to spare.
> CLOSE YOUR EYES
Faint chatter, steps, wheels. The bridge remembers those who came before. Their imprints echo quietly from above.
---
Wind unhindered by life.
It cuts your hands more kindly than any blade.
---
The little creature approaches the water’s edge. The tide ebbs and flows, the shallower parts of the ocean lack its signature opaque darkness. Instead filled with a quiet radiance.
> WALK INTO THE WATER
It’s cold. If you were an older thing it would hunger for you, but alas. You are not ready yet.
Here's another game I found online at random and thought would be a good fit for this site. It takes the form of a timeline, where you can click a specific event to change its outcome, and by doing so change the course of world history. You only have a few events that can be changed to start with, but things butterfly pretty fast.
It's interesting to click around and see the alternate futures you can come up with, but the game has several major issues. The biggest is that it needs some way to make certain events incompatible with each other, so you don't get something like "1930: Sealand takes over the entire world. All other countries become colonies of Sealand. 1947: The Cold War begins between the US and USSR." I also really wish you could change events that are themselves the results of other changed events. That would lead to more in-depth and interesting gameplay.
It's still kind of fun to see how much you can change, though.
This game is vaguely reminiscent of two other games I've played recently, Pageant and PhD Simulator. All three are simulation games with a central focus on grinding through, yep, school. Grad school in the case of PhD Simulator, high school in the case of Pageant and this game. PhD Simulator and this game are both made in custom engines and both very light on writing and story, letting narratives develop naturally through the player's gameplay. Pageant, on the other hand, has an actual storyline about a high schooler named Karen Zhao who applies to a beauty pageant for the sake of college apps. But there are still stats for the beauty pageant and specific requirements that must be met to win, and like in this game, Karen needs to get into a good college. For the sake of your future, they say. It will be worth it, they say.
What's the commonality between these games? They all use resource management mechanics to capture the soulless grind of the American university system and how far people need to go to "make it". PhD Simulator and this game both have a sanity-type mechanic, where your hope lessens day after day as you do nothing but work and study and work, no time for hobbies when you need to meet the metrics or you'll fall behind. Pageant has no sanity stat, only a time stat, but Karen does pass out in the middle of school due to lack of sleep. One of the things you can do when waking up in the nurse's office is say you're fine and go back to class. Can't miss the important content, after all. Look, all these other people will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them. All these other people have gotten their PhDs already. You don't want to fall behind.
In Pageant, the main goal is winning the beauty pageant and not getting into Yale, but that beauty pageant is indirectly about getting into Yale. You're not allowed to do something for its own sake, just to have fun. If you do, it's time you're wasting and should be channeling towards a greater end.
From a post on r/ApplyingToCollege, the subreddit where this game was posted. This post has 2000+ upvotes:
As I write down the activities and awards that describe me, I feel no passion nor excitement over them. Orchestra? Forced to pick an instrument in middle school. Model United Nations? ao's love that, right? Community Service? I couldn't give a single shit about this toxic ass community of selfish humans that doesn't bat an eye what happens to me. I'm not a bright, optimistic person that my activities show. I'm not even the person I say I am in my personal essay that I spent countless hours toiling with my blood, sweat and tears over, which is a cycle im sure will repeat multiple times. Are you kidding me? I'm 18 years old. You want me to write about who I am? I don't even know who I am...
There is this feeling I never felt before. Whenever I feel happy, whenever I ace a test or do something that brings my mood up, I feel a certain dread approach me. It's telling me that I shouldn't be relaxing, or playing games, or reading light novels, or watching anime, and it's telling me that I'm not allowed to feel happy. Don't forget to edit your personal statement! Did you finish your college list yet? Which topics are you writing for the UC essays again? Which college in this university are you applying for? Are you sure you want to apply to this school? What makes this school different than this? Are you going to retake that good sat score because you screwed up the essay? Are you going to miss registration deadlines like last time?
The game itself captures a bit of that experience. Not all of it. It's very light on story, compared to something like Pageant, and unlike Pageant you play as a self-insert with no specific personality. There are no other characters, either. People are only a component of the system, interacted with to raise or lower a number. No names or personalities exist in this game. There is no human interaction, only interaction with the system: work, study, work on apps, repeat. And there's no snippet of narrative with every choice you make to tell you what happens or how close you are to success. Time just silently advances.
The lack of feedback is one of the biggest differences from Pageant and PhD Simulator. In those games, you at least know what you're getting into, and how much work you need to put in to succeed. Here? College admissions processes are notoriously opaque. A person might get accepted at one college for what gets them rejected at another. You have no idea what you're supposed to do, what kind of person you're supposed to be, what kind of thing to focus on. Just grope around blindly and stress yourself out to the point of collapsing from exhaustion because you overwork yourself to the bone, not knowing how much to do and so trying to do everything at once, even if it's impossible.
There are mechanical criticisms you can make of this game. I don't like the approach the game takes towards "have a mental breakdown and be escorted to the mental asylum for a week" and "sleep for three days straight out of exhaustion". They're just punishments for letting your sanity/exhaustion drop to 0, and can happen over and over without any other consequences besides what's stated, which really lessens their impact. I would make it so that missing school from those events adds to your "School missed" counter. Or give multiple occurrences more severe consequences, or even have one be instant gameloss like in PhD Simulator. I also feel that more detailed narrative snippets would benefit the game, and it would be more impactful if it had a clearly defined protagonist who isn't just a featureless self-insert. But 31 Days hasn't been updated in years, so further change is unlikely.
Loads of people would find this game boring and lacking in detail. Without any individual payoff for each choice you make, you enter a pattern of mechanically clicking buttons with no idea what you're ultimately changing or if the result will be worth it. But that IS what elite college apps become for many people. Just look at all the Redditors who played and left comments saying "Sounds like real life".
Note: I've played this game twice and got rejected from all the HYPSMC colleges, both times. The second time I had a perfect 1600 SAT and one mental breakdown.
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.
This is a highly localized story, though we never get any direct descriptions of the protagonist. But to me they clearly seemed to be a college student studying computer science/programming, stuck at home during Covid. The part about being forced to eat meat, despite their own wishes, could be taken literally (they're vegan and their family doesn't approve?) or a metaphor about having to do things you don't want to do, with society imposing its demands on you.
That said. I didn't really feel connected to the protagonist or their situation. Even though I've been in similar situations before. I think more specific details would help anchor this story in reality - we already know the protagonist's some kind of CS student, but what college do they go to and why, why are they studying CS, what is their family like, what are their hopes for the future, etc... Too much was left vague for me. In the end, I couldn't really take anything away from this story.
[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.)
This game has two kinds of passages. The first are these extremely dry descriptions of a nonexistent sociologist named Jacob Balamer, and his research, which seems to be about how humans can best exercise empathy and connect to each other. Interspersed with those are a far more interesting "life simulator" game, of the kind I really liked playing in middle school. I'd link to more examples, but can't seem to find any on IFDB. I'm thinking about games where you control a human protagonist from birth to death. It happens in this life simulator, which sees you playing through various vignettes seemingly based on Balamer's real life (you're presumably a white American guy), with a hefty dash of surreal humor thrown in.
Eventually the two threads connect and (Spoiler - click to show)you realize that Balamer made the life simulator, as an attempt to teach other people about his research. It turns out the game's reception is poor and he disowns his entire body of research, deeming it (and himself) a fraud. The actual game ends up a somewhat strange but uplifting note describing the choices you've made throughout the story and what they say about you. Here's a little sliver of your life, and there are the little slivers of Balamer's life that you've gotten through first reading about his body of work, and playing the game that he created. Even if his research was dry, boring, pointless, and didn't say much about humanity (that was the impression I got from the writing), he still wanted to connect with people, and that's been accomplished via the actual game you just played.
The writer definitely has chops. There's only one error in the entire game I could find ("Space, in it's purest form" instead of "Space, in its purest form"). The game is full of great one-liners and zany snippets, like the below line:
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?
There are a lot of humorous asides: a random survey you can take, a funny clown encounter, etc. One passage is "placeholder text for an unfinished story section that will be added in a future update". I'm 90% certain this is a joke that was done on purpose, but I honestly can't be sure.
The funniest thing that happened to me while playing is that at one point a message came up saying something like: "An update has been released. Would you like to install it now?" and I clicked yes. I was given a ridiculously long loading bar and below that, a message saying: "Please do not close the window while installing".
You'll never guess what I did.
It was an accident, okay.
Anyway, I reopened the game, and through the power of expedient clicking managed to get back to where I was without much time wasted. I didn't even change any of my answers! (Well, except the survey answer. I tried to skip the survey. Didn't work.)
Thoughts overall... The game is well-written, but despite that didn't entirely gel with me. There are moments that made me laugh and moments that made me feel contemplative, but I think the ending came on too suddenly and the descriptions of Balamer's work were ultimately too dry and full of meaningless academic babble for me to really connect with them, or Balamer as a character. Not great, considering he's such a large part of the story. I also think the story undercuts itself in parts with the humorous asides--not that I hated them, but maybe I would like more focus on the serious, contemplative parts to give them space to breathe apart from the comedy? Because when the game gets serious, it's good, but the parts that are serious feel too short and insubstantial to have any real weight.
That's just me, though. At any rate, this story has pizzazz, and I can appreciate that.
Quotes:
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.
What I liked: Music + headphones is great. Styling and writing is on point. Aesthetics are gold. Really love the image of the one girl leaving the monastery as it's frozen in time, opening the gates which stand still like an "open ribcage". And other imagery like the selection of weapons the first girl can choose from, which are revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)the same as the second girl's selection of weapons, in a stunning symmetry. One girl has antlers, an odd detail which is never explained, but combined with the antler-shaped chapter transitions I think it becomes charming.
It's been a while since I played any of Porpentine's games, so while I could vaguely appreciate the resemblance, what I really thought of was Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring. The dark fantasy landscape with moonlight and angel blades and scarred women and crumbling cathedrals evoked that for me. Cool stuff.
What I didn't like: I think it might be too aestheticized. There's a lack of specificity that nags at me--little is explained about these characters or the greater world they inhabit. And the evil nuns and monastery feel a bit too on-the-nose, maybe? I think more details about the setting would help flesh it out more, and flesh out the characters, by extension. Speaking of the characters - without a richer background world to ground them in, their interactions feel too simple. They grow apart because of the book, they leave each other, they have a final encounter that ends, depending on the retelling, in bloodshed or a final conversation or nothing. That's all.
That's another thing: I'm not sure how I feel about the "multiple versions of their final encounter" structure. On the one hand, it's nice to see variations on how things might have played out, but I feel like they confuse the overall story. Especially that section where one actually kills the other, guided by "sacred algorithms". The inability to change your choices there was a nice touch, but it felt out of place since it didn't add much to the story as a whole.
What I'd change: My favorite moment came towards the end. It was where the first girl, the one who stays, reveals that she stayed more out of fear than faith--that she learned the gods view them as "punctuation", nothing more, and can no longer believe in anything. I felt like this revelation added a lot to her character, and wish it was explored more, or referenced more in different ways across the various chapters. Without it, she becomes a more two-dimensional "the original god is the best god and you are a heretic so I must kill you" character, which I can't find sympathy for. With it, I found her much more compelling, and it adds a lot to the world as well, knowing that these gods with so many devotees don't care about them in any way.
I really wish there was more built on that, about losing your faith and entire foundations of your worldview. About the gods and how their presence or lack thereof has influenced this strange desert world with its crumbling golems and cathedrals. But the way the story is told, passing quickly through time via small vignettes, tends towards summarizing and simplifying what must have been complex revelations for its characters in the moment. If we really saw more of the characters grappling with their faiths (or lack thereof) and with themselves, I think that'd add a lot.
Personally, I would remove the extraneous endings that don't seem to contribute to the overall story and the dynamic of the main characters (especially the "sacred algorithms" one where one girl kills another). Then I would expand on the particular dynamic between the two main characters that is described in the last ending, especially the first girl's realization that the gods don't care about mortal specks of dust. So instead of "good deity vs. bad deity", it becomes "a deity you can believe in vs. the inability to believe in any faith".
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