Reviews by Cerfeuil

This game is really trippy. And hilarious.

Took me a while to figure out you were supposed to give the meat to the dog - there was what seems like a red herring, where there's also a guy trying to discard meat in the alleyway outside the pizza place. But I never figured out what the point of that was and eventually obtained meat via the kitchen.

After that, the rest of it was fairly easy. Good game. I noticed a few typos and lightly implemented areas, but nothing to get too worked up about.

The one quibble I had was that initially, while I was fiddling around, I somehow managed to reach a point where I named the kitchen fridge "dog", and then couldn't interact with it even though the room description said the "dog" was in the room. My guess is that the security guard noticed it and took it away, but the fridge is still fixed to one place, so the description didn't change? I really have no clue, though. I was swapping a bunch of names around at once, so maybe I broke something and didn't realize it. I ended up restoring an earlier save and beat the game more easily when I knew where all the names were and didn't have to chase down the stray refrigerator or wastebasket running around the premises.

Also, the ending is amazing:

(Spoiler - click to show)
The gnome goes on: "I said you could expose a changeling with iron. That baby's not a changeling."

"What do you mean?" you say. "It's hideous!"

"Yeah, that's what human babies look like."


Overall, it took me about an hour to finish this game, because of the meat thing. Really smooth sailing after that. I'll also note I played the comp edition, so the game is even better now!

-

Highlights from my playthrough (contains the mildest of spoilers. IFDB is being finicky with nesting blockquotes inside spoilers, so I'll leave them unspoiled):

'Staring at the baby in the crib, you just can't believe it. That...thing just can't be human. There's no way. It looks like a shriveled apple with flailing hands and feet.'

'Oberon's Pizza Parlor'

'"No way that's a human," you say.

"Sounds like you have a changeling problem," says the gnome sitting next to you.

That's when you notice the gnome sitting next to you.'

'>x plants
Looks like grass. Seeing it survive in these harsh conditions fills you with determination.'

'>x counter
The counter looks like it's made of formica. You don't know what formica actually is or what it looks like, but this has got that weird texture and color that makes you think, "Yeah, that's formica."'

'>x memo
This note says:

Important:

Monitors are for night time use only. Daytime guards should be constantly on patrol!

Night time guards, for safety purposes, please remain inside the room and use monitors exclusively.

All guards should report promptly to loud noises, including screams'

Disclaimer: the following review is heavily biased because I love AI and post-apocalyptic settings and especially when the two are combined, so from the outset the concept was hitting all the right notes. I mean, "post-apocalyptic AI overseeing the remnants of the world" is an idea that resonates with my soul. Plus it's based on a poem by Kit Riemer, who's one of my favorite IF authors. I fell in love immediately.

Also, the ending, as they say, ripped my heart in two.

(Spoiler - click to show)I can't believe the author had the guts to kill off the protagonist like that. I mean, what the hell? When the ending happened, I think I stared blankly at the screen for a while. Then I said to myself, "There has to be a way to avoid this." Then I replayed and discovered the game was entirely linear. None of your choices matter at all. There's no way to avoid failure.

The ending message is devastating. It really makes the game for me, knowing that no matter what you do, you can't avoid your fate. You're always going to be left dead and forgotten. At first I rankled knowing everything I'd done was meaningless, and then the more I thought about it the more I realized how perfectly tragic it was. You were doomed before the game even started. And the slow decline from setting out on your mission with purpose to falling behind and eventually dying unceremoniously is so well-paced.

It makes the greater setting, which is hinted at in just the right ways, even cooler. Throughout the game you're treated to glimpses of what might have caused the earth to become uninhabitable and where the humans went. It's tantalizing to have these sketches of the wider world you'll never know more about because you're going to die alone. And the whole story revolves around futility, so it fits.



Other stuff:

The writing's good. Not necessarily on the sentence-by-sentence level, but in the way all the lovely aphorisms are put together. The snippets of art. The odd dreams you have while in sleep mode. While not directly relevant to the plot, they resonate with the themes of death, solitude, and the search for purpose in a way I can't totally articulate.

I also couldn't avoid thinking about Kit Riemer's Consciousness Hologram and Universal Hologram. There's a scene in I think Universal Hologram where you're watching Youtube videos from thousands of years ago and the Internet, long-ascended to sentient AI status, is fruitlessly trying to explain them to you. But neither of you actually know what's going on. All this stuff has been shorn of its original meaning because so much has been destroyed, and no matter how hard you try you can't recreate it.

In short: Love how your entire existence here is for the sake of a long-gone species you can never fully understand, and love how it ends. Such a keen sense of loneliness and loss.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]

The UI in this game is fantastic. The effort to recreate Discord's interface, right down to the typing indicators, is incredible. Also love how it switches around depending on which character you're typing as. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see Twine games do, recreating existing websites and playing with the medium in a way that makes full use of Twine's HTML capabilities and the potential of web fiction in general. Great stuff.

The plot, however, I have some quibbles with. The topic is dark, it's interesting, and it's treated with the gravity it deserves. But as a person who's been in a few close-knit Discord servers, I feel like what the story is missing is a real sense of community with more fleshed-out characters. Since the game is so short, we don't have time to get a sense of who any of the characters are. Name, age, gender, and some vague descriptors is pretty much it. None of them have the time to feel like real people. We don't get to see how the community works and what things were like before the revelations came out, which deadens the impact of it all. We're told that Cornelius is admired and respected more than we're shown that. We only see him (Spoiler - click to show)being a creep, and I guessed that he was a predator almost immediately. It wasn't a surprise at all. I think if there was more detail on the specifics of these people and more on what things were like before it all went down, more of a gradual reveal that there's something wrong with this guy, it would make the revelations and the decision to dissolve the group at the end much more impactful.

Also wish there was more choice involved, though I'm not sure how. I only played once, but there doesn't seem to be a broad range of choices. It's either (Spoiler - click to show)"tell everyone what Cornelius did" or "don't", and what sane person wouldn't pick the first option? I get that in real life there are various reasons people wouldn't want to, but as a reader choosing not to tell just strips you from being able to see the full narrative.

Also, and this may just be a pet peeve of mine, some of the character voices feel slightly off. The older characters especially. Their inclusion is odd in the first place because I rarely see mixed-age groups online and especially people older than 30 or 40, although this might just be a side effects of the communities I'm in. I can see it making sense here with the history of the group, though some more history and notes on how the younger members ended up joining might help. Anyway. A lot of the older characters' dialogue came across as old people talk for the sake of making them look old, i.e. dropping 'boy', and 'dear' all the time. Basically, the older characters rang the least true to me. But as I just said I have no idea how older people act in chatrooms, so who am I to talk?

It's still an interesting game, though. I liked how the flashbacks slowly revealed more of the story over time. And the escalation from (Spoiler - click to show)"Cornelius is acting off here" to "Cornelius is a straight-up predator", coupled with the drama of the car accident, unfolds well. I think if it was longer, and gave us more time to get attached to the characters, I'd feel the vibes more.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]

Interesting style of writing which is more poetry than prose. Prose poem, if you will. Love the surrealism and the moody atmosphere with its urban melancholy. The game reveals just enough to keep you guessing, but doesn't overexplain. The puzzles are dreamy enough to fit the mood, with sensible solutions, though the frequent deaths were slightly annoying since each takes you back to the beginning.

Sadly there are a few errors with spelling/grammar that detracted from the experience. And I thought the true end was too melodramatic for my tastes, but the writing is gorgeous. One of my favorite entries for the comp.

A few excerpts:

The seventh flight
Is dark and stifled like
Sleep after middle age,
Oxygen thin,
Never quite enough,
You wheeze on the unseen stairs.

Borough
You see the tongue of the main road,
Pearled with streetlights,
The sigil shape of the intersection,
A track-flash light up the crowded sky,
The lamplight-snake of the slope down onto the common
And, deep in the park,
A white light
That illuminates the error between the trees,
A glass house
Under a tiled roof,
A wrong home in a place not for people.

The school eats you alive.
Not at all surprising,
You were certain it would from the very first day.
They used to make you prey here,
Taught you about homophones and stripped you down to your underpants
To stretch on the greasy floor,
Provoked vomiting fits in the hall at lunchtime
And put you on a table with your
Face turned to the wall
And told you every day
To grow up
So you could get old enough to die.
You remember writing something on the wall,
Scored a red wound in the brick
By the exhaust pipes that steamed like dragons
In a secret language no one could read,
Not even you.
You wonder what it said.
You wonder if it's still there,
Somewhere inside the monster,
Down in the black of it
At the very end.

Here's a comment I made on the itch.io page, copied over because I figure it's long enough for a review and this game is cool:

THE COMPUTERFRIEND DATING SIM LIVES

I can finally die happy.

In all seriousness this wasn't what I expected from Computerfriend Dating Sim (was imagining a more computery love interest, with mouse and keyboard and everything? Computer monitor covered in lipstick. You know, the works) but this is fun too. Seems like this follows from the 'happiest' ending of Computerfriend, where you release the AI into the interwebz after undergoing a little psychological recovery of your own. Now you've returned to Godfield for whatever reason and the AI therapist is there to (possibly) have a one night stand with you. Also he doesn't tell you he happens to be your old therapist. (That might be some kind of professional integrity violation, but it seems C doesn't care. There are definitely worse one night stands to be had...)

It feels bittersweet, you've both changed and you can't go back to how things are, which is maybe why the relationship could never be more than a one night stand. Would get pretty awkward if you ever figured out C's real identity, I guess. Though I'll be real the fact that this isn't a 1 million word epic "I Slowly Fall In Love With My Former AI Therapist" is mildly disappointing.

There's something to be said too about the distance that you can create between C and the protagonist. By rebuffing his advances, you can tell youself that he's only a "thing" and you should be spending more time with people "like you". Pushing him away by thinking of him as a different species. Though in other parts the story makes it clear that you aren't so much different, both machines, in a way. Prediction engines. And, in the past, you were both held back from the real world by either depression (you) or the unfortunate state of being a digitally bound consciousness (C). Situations both of you have now escaped from.

Questions I can't answer: Is there any reason C is male specifically? Also is it just a one night stand or is there the potential for something bigger there, like you contact C again and become the bosomist of buddies and really fall in love (1 million word epic style)? Also what is the meaning of that bit you see from C's perspective and the poem you can get at the end? C seems somewhat critical of the protagonist, I mean, "it is more like me than I am... More a personality cluster than an individual, absorbing what it thinks will make it interesting" - harsh, dude - though also he seems afraid he might have hurt you ("Please don't picture me"). In the poem he essentially says he has a larger (digital) soul than you? (a statement about how existence as an AI has much more potential than existence as a human, as far as having 24/7 wifi access goes?) But also that the digital soul overflows into emotion and will eventually destroy him, even as you suck up the dregs? Or, I am not an English major and don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway very fun, 10/10 would not vacation in Godfield

---

TLDR: Play this if you liked Computerfriend. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Computerfriend given they might miss out on some important context, so the real takeaway is play Computerfriend first so you can understand everything! And so you can experience Computerfriend, which is a top tier game.

Disclaimer: I'm biased towards Bogleech since he made Awful Hospital. Awful Hospital is a fantastic interactive horror webcomic in the style of Homestuck meets Chandler Groover, and you should read it because I'm a complete shill.

Don't Get Spooked! is a good game in its own right, though. Bog has this signature comedy horror style. Surreal, grotesque, and more-than-mildly disturbing, but funny enough to offset all the horror. The setting and concepts are wildly inventive, the art is delightful (and all hand-drawn by him!). This game's heavy on visuals, and the main point of it is to go around looking at and interacting with the 60+ monsters on display. If you do the right things you get items, which can be used with other monsters, and on you go solving puzzles and expanding your inventory until you reach the end. Ultimately this is a light-hearted game, despite the subject matter. It's jampacked with references to various creepypastas, so you should definitely give it a try if you're a fan of internet horror.

Anyway, five stars. Mileage may vary, since the puzzles are admittedly not amazing and mostly boil down to 'guess the correct interactions to help you progress', but for me the art and writing more than make up for it. I love Bog's style, which does a great job of going between high-kilter parody like this:

The SKELETON WHO POPPED OUT downs the ECTO COOLER in a single gulp and does a RIGHTEOUS FLIP as he SMASHES the empty juice box against his SKELETAL FOREHEAD.

He gives you TWO THUMBS UP as his RAD SPEX fly off his face and land DIRECTLY ONTO YOURS.

It's okay, he had a SECOND, IDENTICAL PAIR under the first.

The BODACIOUS CADAVER proceeds to SHRED THROUGH THE ROOF and DISAPPEAR INTO THE SKY, his skeleton finally RAD ENOUGH for RAD SKELETON HEAVEN, which is in fact the ONLY KIND of HEAVEN.

I have seen the black. It is a black without end, but not without life. Squamous figures writhe and flounder in that shunned abyss, groaning and gibbering forms that flock to an intruder's warmth and breath like moths to a flame. I can still see their dim lights through the windows, eyes like swampfire bobbing in the distant gloom.

"CHITTER CHATTER! CLITTER CLATTER! TWITCH AND TINGLE TO A LUSTFUL REUNION OF SCABROUS ORIFICES BENEATH A FLY-BLOWN MOON."

"All you brats have been put through Vomit School, but you're the only one who learned anything there. And you have the motivation. Turn this business around, and you stand to inherit something."

A surreal business management sim about vomit. The gameplay is pretty bare-bones. Once you figure out a good set of expenditures - which is mainly a matter of changing the vomit formula - you can more or less stick with it. I won on my first try. (If only running a successful business in real life was that easy...)

A lot of the stats can be ignored - I didn't touch QA or training or processing, for example. The game could also stand to be way more clear on what some of the stats actually do. Right now most of the gameplay is "tweak stat, see if it does anything, repeat". Besides the vomit formula, the other stats I got the most mileage out of were wholesale price, varieties, and gallons produced. (Particularly, increasing varieties to 10 seems to up demand with no downside. What's up with that?) The formula guessing minigame is slightly fun, but also somewhat tedious. (The controls for changing ingredient percentages stat by stat can be really annoying, so I wonder if you could make different formula presets and have shortcuts for setting the balance to a specific formula?

Random events each quarter change the calculations, and though they initially have little impact, I found myself getting surprisingly invested in changing the numbers to max out profit. Capitalism, baby!

The little dialogue snippets you get every quarter are the real gem of this game, though, not the gameplay. Simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Best of all, the background events aren't totally random but follow a fixed storyline, and you can feel the economic shocks influence your decisions. (In other words: the war is the best part.) The author said this is just a proof of concept, and I hope we get more. Lots of storytelling potential here.

Excerpt:

"He's got his own vomit factory now?"

"Fuck no. He says that's unnatural. What he's started is a center for holistic vomit. That douchebag is telling people they need to rediscover their cultural heritage and reclaim the means of vomiting from the soulless clutches of fat cat industrialists."

"So?"

"So, he's charging people to come vomit in his ugly-ass clay pots."

"You mean he's paying them?"

"No, he's charging them, and those gullible fucks are eating it up!"

"...the new confessionals proliferated. They assign penance through complex and unknowable mechanisms, utilizing the latest advancements in computational theology. To many, confession whispered through a handset feels closer to God. Machines, after all, are humanity's bridge to the divine."

Really liked this game. Intimate, heartfelt, and true to life. Quite beautiful too.

The concept of coin-operated confessional booth is wonderful. It's the unity of man, machine, and divinity that gets me, the idea of God living in the wires and responding, in God's unknowable way, to what you have to say. And I love the concept of anonymous messages whispered in the dark, where you don't know who or what will ever hear you. Messages offered to anyone out there, if anyone's there at all.

It reminds me of websites out there where you can read anonymously-sourced confessions (https://loneliness.one/confession and https://postsecret.com/ come to mind, though a brief web search reveals dozens of sites like them). An alt-universe Internet, of sorts.

I thought you might be playing as someone offering a confession to one of these booths, but you're actually playing as the machine. Which is a killer concept, cherry on the cake really. There's only a limited amount of interaction you're allowed with people, because you can only interface with them through the machine. They can confess their deepest, darkest secrets to you and your only way to respond is through the perfectly mechanical choice of whether you accept the confession or not, and if you do, how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys you assign to them. You can't respond, you can't comfort or criticize them, you can't let them know you're there, even though you are. Yet the confession is only given because the interaction is so mechanical and impersonal that it's almost like nobody is there at all.

I'm also a fan of the setting: an alternate world much like our own, with comparable technology but a new history and new countries that imply a beautifully strange world beyond the confines of the tiny place we see. Reminds me of Disco Elysium a bit. And I gotta mention the sound and visual design, which sells the "just another night in a strange city almost but not quite like our own" ambiance. You see the city sleep, and you see it wake up again. Incredibly immersive. This game is great.

A nice slice-of-life story about family. The protagonist and their father go on a fishing trip together - the stuff of an old-timey family tale - but towards the end it's gradually revealed (Spoiler - click to show)the fishing takes place in OUTER SPACE and this is a science fiction story, hence the title. But despite the grandiose backdrop, the story focuses on the minutiae of everyday life, the intricacies of father-child relationships. The other stuff, really, is just a backdrop. (Spoiler - click to show)Even though humans have advanced to the outer boundaries of the solar system, family and all the complicated emotions that come with it still hold strong.

I wish there was less linearity in the story. You can make choices, but they don't influence much and some are never brought up again after you make them. There were also a few grammatical errors, which at times made it hard to parse what was happening. But I liked the overall atmosphere, especially the Twine theming. Blue-grey color scheme goes hard.

Finished in ~10 minutes.

It starts with one of those classic "you wake up confused and bound in an empty room" openings, but things quickly go haywire from there. As you eventually find out, your job is (Spoiler - click to show)containing demons for a temple by serving as their human vessel. All you have to do is let yourself be bound, then sleep in peace. Easy, right? But something's set the temple on fire, and the voices in your head are getting louder...

The game makes good use of its situation - at the start your past is uncertain, your identity is in flux, and there's multiple confusing voices in your head telling you what they think you should do. But as you play, you realize what your situation is and that makes the "right" choices more clear. In other words, this is one of those games that benefits hugely from repeat playthroughs. I played it four times and got, I think, all the endings. I think I can safely say (Spoiler - click to show)the voices in your head are supposed to be some degree of ambiguously evil. After I realized this I stopped murdering people, though to my disappointment it didn't seem to impact the endings at all.

(Spoiler - click to show)Demonic possession is kind of overplayed, and there are slightly unfortunate implications with the whole "people who hear voices are psychotic murderers" thing, but I'm personally fond of "voice in your head" narratives, and it did work well with the song.

Took me maybe ten minutes to get all the endings (lots of repeat text between the different paths). Having more story differences between the paths, or more elaboration on the world in general/what exactly are the voices in your head? could make the game feel more substantial. It was fun nonetheless.