Reviews by Cerfeuil
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Disclaimer: extraordinarily rambly and somewhat offtopic review. I hope I am not offending Polish and/or European and/or non-European people with this review!
I'm from the US and have never been to Poland. There's a part of me that badly wants to travel to Poland, or to another European country, or to any other country really. For a long time I've been fascinated by how people in different countries live. I'd love to see every country in the world before I die, though that's an unrealistic and prohibitively expensive goal, dangerous depending on the country, and probably not worth it, since traveling to a place is hardly the same as living there. Visiting an area as a tourist who doesn't understand the language is the opposite of being a local. The real shame is that just by being born in a certain place, you're locked out of the vast majority of the world, and you'll never be able to really communicate with the majority of humans who only speak languages you'll never be fluent in.
Anyway. To a loser American like me, Poland and other European countries have a certain sophisticated aura... of history, of rich culture and tradition, of bygone medieval kingdoms and such... not to mention the history of Poland itself, which has gone through periods of subsumption by various empires before arising yet again like a glorious phoenix from death and alright these previous sentences are laying it on thick, so I will add that I may or may not have gone through a "countryball" phase in school and this may or may not be relevant. (Don't search up "countryball" if you value your opinion of what "the kids these days" are doing with their free time.)
Also I will add that I know every country does all kinds of heinous things. And that Europe gets to be known as a mystical land of sophistication in part due to the legacy of European colonialism. (British colonialism is why I'm even writing this post in English, if you think about the history of the US.) And that people in other countries are just people and there's nothing particularly special about them at the end of the day just because they exist somewhere. And that every place has problems and we shouldn't put any particular country on a pedestal, or glorify what shouldn't be glorified. I probably don't get out enough, and should touch grass and stop fantasizing about international travel. I probably won't.
Since travel costs too much time and money, is reading a story from someone who lives in a certain country a substitute for traveling there? Can it provide you with the experience of really being a local? I've never been to Poland, but reading this story felt like being there, if only for a few short minutes. We have trains where I live in the US, too, which aren't so different from Polish trains. I think. Tracks going off into the fog, mournful calls in the night and all that. But at the same time, there's an extra level of mystique for me because these are Polish trains. Inheritors of Polish history, imbued with that Polish "aura"... If I saw them, would they have Polish text on the sides? And the people within would talk in Polish about Polish problems, as they travel to and from faraway cities I'll never touch in my lifetime, etc...
For me, stories about life in other countries are fun because they can teach you about places you've never been and never will go to. Particularly if these are countries you might never visit, particularly if these stories focus on history, culture, politics, and all the things that make up a different society. This story is about the specific experience of being stuck in rural Poland during Covid, and has details specific to that. Musings on the difference between village life and city life, and how rural hometowns (home villages in this case, I guess) can suck you in until you find it difficult to return and are relegated to watching the trains pass you by, thinking about the life you could've had. Nothing I've ever experienced or will experience, though I've heard of how isolated North American hometowns can trap people, and reading about the Polish equivalent fascinates me. This was a pattern for me with this short story: seeing details that remind me of things I've seen in the US, but more alluring because they're Polish. How much of this is myself projecting my own deranged European obsession onto the story, I don't know. There's also a detail highly specific to Poland, made all the more special because the previous details could be generalized to rural railroads internationally but this is highly localized: a mention of "decaying farming machines that remember Soviet Union". For obvious reasons, we don't have Soviet farming machines in the US. The combination of familiar and unfamiliar things is breathtaking. It evoked for me the feeling of international travel, the strange wonderousness of seeing things almost but not quite familiar. Seeing the great unity and diversity of humanity (insert spiel about the beauty of humanity here). I want to go to Poland and see the old Soviet remnants. I want to travel to places that have been touched by a different kind of history. I'm fantasizing about international travel again.
One last note: There are a few "Polish-isms" in this writing that are really charming to me, like omitting "the" before "Soviet Union". As one of those US citizens who are so commonly mocked for only being able to write in one language, I have great admiration and respect for the author who can write in English, presumably Polish, and possibly even more.
A story that is actually seven stories, intertwined. You are Bluebeard's eighth wife and walk around his home accompanied by the ghosts (literal talking heads) of his previous wives. Each has a story of how she came to meet and marry the husband who would kill her, and each story is compellingly told.
It made me think about the institution of marriage as a whole. I saw some feminist critiques of marriage a while back, arguing that it's a forced labor contract where the man has all the power and the woman has none and must do unpaid domestic work at his bidding. This is especially true of marriage in historical times, and most of these wives don't seem to be from the modern world.
A woman who marries someone is traditionally expected to go along with his wishes, accompany him wherever he wants and defer to him for judgement. If he wants you to leave home and go with him, you go. If he wants you to clean house and play hostess, you do, because he gave you everything, didn't he? If being an old and single woman isn't socially acceptable, you have to bear with it. And if the marriage turns bad and divorce isn't allowed, there is really no escape. As a side note: In the US, banks could prevent women from opening their own bank accounts independently, without a signature from their husbands, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974. And today, of course, there are still countries in the world where the status of women's rights is quite miserable.
WIFE #3
...[T]here were matters that needed to be tended to at the estate, he told me. We would have to travel back. My heart dropped. I had forgotten that we were now one entity, and in all the dreams I had of this moment, he was the one telling me that he had to leave, not that we had to leave. I opened my mouth to protest, but already I knew it was futile. Behind me, my sisters trailed up from the ocean, silently watching our conversation unfold. I told myself I would not let myself cry in front of them, but in all honesty, I was too angry at him and at myself to cry.
As the situation gets worse, each wife's ability to escape it also lessens. Taken back to the estate, removed from their own familial and social ties, all these women lose their individuality in the eyes of the world and become nothing more than "WIFE": 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Marriage to Bluebeard grants them some power, but it is really his borrowed power, not her own, and when he decides to take it all back there is nothing she can do about it.
There are no choices that split the story, so the entire thing can be experienced in one playthrough. A good read.
Excerpt:
WIFE #2
When we were married, we paraded through the streets of my small village, the dress he chose all but swallowing me up. I held my head high as we passed by in the carriage, looking each person who had referred to me as a devil in the eye. Still smiling as he waved to the villagers outside, he had asked me which of them I would like to punish for wanting me dead. My mouth opened and closed in part-astonishment, part-fear. There was no need to reply now, he had said. Think about it and let me know if there are any names. You own them now.
There were a few days before our honeymoon began in earnest, and the question kept me awake at night like a hot coal burning in my chest. I lay awake long after Bluebeard had begun to snore softly. I had the power to destroy them now, but did that mean I should? I thought back to the year, how the comments and barbs directed at my parents had at first been subtle, then more pointed, until they became bolder and bolder, to the point where my father returned home with bruises and scrapes after getting into a fight at the tavern, and my mother was snubbed by all our neighbours. I unfurled the list of grievances in my heart, and made my mind up.
The day before we left on a tour of the mainland, I whispered the names into his ear. He reacted as if I were merely giving him the names of flowers I liked. Smiling, he patted my hand and said that he would take care of it.
I had almost forgotten about it completely by the time we returned. As our carriage drove through the village, we passed by the big gates that led to Bluebeard’s estate. Like a welcome parade, there were the villagers I had named, tied spread eagled, nude, to the thorny brambles that surrounded the chateau. Their cries for us to be merciful were like a symphony to my ears. I turned to Bluebeard, who had grinned at me. I hope my wife has enjoyed her welcome, he said. The gates closed on the villagers’ cries.
Infinite Utopian Dreamland Afterlife, February 10, 2025After you die, if your coffin isn't sealed all around with pewter nails, you'll seep down through the soil. Thinner than mist, you'll drain past root, worm, and stone, through the spigot, and into Lozengy.
My transcript, with commentary, is linked. I played for more than an hour and got both endings.
Of the Shufflecomp games I played this year, this was one of my favorites. I consider it inordinately charming. The puzzles were a little difficult, though others didn't seem to have any issues with them, so I guess I'm just not great at catching details. There is also some underimplementation, but that's to be expected from a small comp game.
What I really adore about this one is the setting. It's one of those surreal fantasy settings where there are no true problems in the world. In real life you can turn on the news and hear stories about the most godawful thing possible, but Lozengy is beautiful in an alien way because it's so far removed from humanity and all its issues. It's dreamlike and bursting with endless new wonders. It's somewhere not here, somewhere so far from here that it doesn't even know where "here" is, and it doesn't need to care.
The setting also happens to be an afterlife. I say "an" and not "the" because the opening implies there are other afterlives, alternative possibilities for the soul after you die in this universe. But the afterlife part is relevant to the gameplay, which consists of doing tasks to care for this interstitial space people can find themselves in when they die. A wonderful realm where the grass is purple and the water hums and cake can be made out of thin air.
I've read many stories with interesting and unique spins on the afterlife. I found most of them on Reddit's r/writingprompts years ago, through prompts like New arrivals in eternal Hell may choose either of the following: a small wooden spoon, or a 100-trillion year vacation in Heaven., and You have died. You walk up a huge spiral staircase and it takes you a thousand years to reach the top. You’re exhausted, but to your surprise you are greeted with the pearly gates, except they’re completely rusted over. A sign reads “Welcome to Heaven, Population: 1” and When someone dies, they go to a platform where you can choose to move in to the afterlife, not knowing whether you will go to heaven or hell. You meet someone who has stood there for millenia, trying to decide if they should go. For that last one, the top response was a story where actually everyone went to Heaven but nobody knew that, so people who knew they'd done the wrong thing and sincerely believed they'd go to Hell were punished by being locked out of Heaven forever since they were too scared to open the door. ("Isn't that unfair to people who believe they did the right or wrong thing when they didn't?" Sure, but it was a random Reddit comment I read years ago, I'm just relaying it because I thought it was interesting.)
That's a digression and not really relevant to the game, except as an example of how stories about afterlives often go. Often you get parables with some kind of sly moral. This story isn't like that at all, it's more an exploration of a fantastical world that is part of a greater, all-encompassing universal order. There is a Heaven in this world, but no Hell, not even an interstitial Hell like the one in the story I described above. The one soul you guide to Choirmount was a killer in his past life, but when it's his time to join, he is welcomed with open arms. It seems that everything is forgiven. I think there's something beautiful about that, a world with no eternal punishment and no fiery gates, no torture and brimstone. Also a world without the cold annihilation of scientific atheism, not a dreamless oblivion but only eternal love for everyone... Now, maybe I'm projecting. Who knows. Anolelona does call Choirmount a "dead end", but they end up where they want in the end, so it's plausible that Choirmount simply isn't for them. At any rate, I personally wouldn't mind joining some kind of eternal blissful chorus. It feels far preferable to the real world.
I might compare this game to another game about the afterlife I've played, Provizora Parko, and Beautiful Dreamer, which I thought Provizora Parko resembled in certain small ways. An aura of surreal whimsy unites all three. But this one takes the cake (the magical infinite free cake) for me in terms of how much I would love to sink into the setting and live there forever, following the protagonist and Anolelona in their adventures through a world where you can explore eternity to your heart's content...
As the ending says: (Spoiler - click to show)"I'm coming down!" you cry. There is no answer, not yet, but there is plenty of time for that, so much time, all the time.
Also compare Joel G's ENA animations, though they're twice as surreal and come with a general feeling of threat humming along in the background, and the many whimsical children's books I read in elementary school, like The Phantom Tollbooth.
Really, it's a marvelous thing.
Oh, and I guess the main character and Anolelona are abandoning their duties by skiving off to explore the infinite realms of magic instead, but it seems like this afterlife can mostly run itself. At the least, the workload seems small enough that Aowma could probably handle it on her own. Is that wishful thinking? Maybe, but there's no evidence against it, right?
Worryingly, it appears this game is no longer playable since Qiaobooks, the creator company, has gone out of business. The IF archive link only gives me an infinite loading screen. Waited several minutes and tried multiple browsers, but no dice.
The IFDB description says "former commercial", which is amazing because I wouldn't pay for this in a million years. It's a very primitive resource management parser game. Now, there can be good resource management parser games like Olivia's Orphanoirium, but this isn't it. Gameplay consists of buying and selling goods at different cities to make a profit, with some bells and whistles attached, but not many. Quickly it became repetitive and boring, in part due to the lack of descriptions for anything I was doing. Nothing but numbers and barebones text. The concept is interesting, but this hardly does a good job of making you really feel like an 1800s merchant in Asia. Stopped playing after less than 20 minutes.
I found this game while looking for games about (Spoiler - click to show)insects, body horror, infestation, that kind of thing. So the story, which some other reviews call a mystery plot, was obvious to me from the get-go. I found it solid and entertainingly told. Also not very original, but who needs originality when you've got (Spoiler - click to show)INSECT PARASITES?! That burrow under your skin and live inside you?!
Clears throat.
Anyway. What this game really is missing is well-clued puzzles. Good puzzles, really. I'm the exception among this game's existing reviewers on IFDB in that I thought the puzzles weren't very well done and ran into guess-the-verb errors a few times. In particular, I got stuck because I kept trying to (Spoiler - click to show)"loosen screws with butterknife" instead of "loosen painting with butterknife"... even though the painting is secured to the wall by the screws.
The navigation is also somewhat confusing. (Spoiler - click to show)You start outside the house, then go inside the house, and in classic fashion the door magically locks behind you. Alright. But what's unintuitive and underclued is that you'll eventually need to go outside the house by opening the bathroom window and going down a tree. Then you won't be able to get back in because of the magically locked front door, so you'll need to go east of the van into the woods, navigate a rather boring maze, and then you end up back in the cemetary. The process is made easier after you find Daisy and get her key, which works on the front door, but boy howdy is it annoying at first.
The endgame in general I found really unintuitive, to the point where I had to read the actual source code of this game to figure out what I was supposed to do. Thankfully the source code is available, otherwise I'd never have beaten this. But I've never played the game that this game is apparently based on, so some of the commands were just plain nonsensical. (Spoiler - click to show)How was I supposed to know to "push cabinet" in the kitchen? And "rub algae with towel" in the moist basement, to reveal the brick, was unintuitive for me. And don't even get me started on "open crypt with shovel" to "take slime" , or "pour gasoline on self", which I had to look at the source code to figure out. Maybe it's because I don't play enough oldschool parsers. I dunno.
The fact that this game is based on another, older one also explains the large number of items lying around that pretty much don't do anything. The pitcher or dagger, for example. I didn't like having those red herrings around and taking up space in my inventory.
But since there's still an interesting story hidden underneath all this, here's a walkthrough so that you, if anyone's even reading this, don't have to suffer like I did.
(Spoiler - click to show)
in
open door
n
w
open cabinet
take matches
x sink
take butterknife
e
read note
n
take candle
light candle
l
look under rug
take keys
s
e
read second note
l
open door
w
up
w
w
n
read third note
s
e
e
n
n
n
x painting
loosen painting with butterknife
take painting
press button
n
read book
s
s
s
up
e
x chest
open chest
look in chest
l
x camera
push camera west
switch on camera
take sledgehammer
down
n
n
e
x body
take towel
open window
e
down
s
unlock van
open van
in
take gasoline
x monitor
out
e
n
n
w
w
take shovel
open door with shovel
in
x slime
touch slime
x self
out
open gate
s
e
w
w
up
n
up
open trap door
climb ladder
x daisy
talk to daisy
z
z
l
take key
read fourth note
down
s
down
w
push cabinet
w
down
s
x flower
smell flower
take flower
rub algae with towel
take brick
unlock keyhole
down
down
n
x joe
talk to joe
z
z
throw flower at joe
hit joe with sledgehammer
x seal
hit seal with sledgehammer
i
blow out candle
drop all
l
take matches
pour gasoline on self
drop gasoline can
n
x queen
light matches
YOU WIN!
For bonus points (read: a !FUN! ending), try going in without the gasoline. Or lighting the gasoline can directly.
If you look at the reviews for this game, you'll notice they say it has a lot of direct links to Youtube videos. You'll also notice this game was published in 2014. This is a bad sign. When I played, instead of the sweeping vistas I was (presumably) supposed to get, I was greeted with "This video is private." over and over again. Every time I went to a new room. Every time I clicked anything. There's a choice to look out the window, so I looked, and whoops! "This video is private." Rather gives the whole thing a different feeling than intended.
If you want to include Youtube videos in a game, I would recommend directly downloading and embedding the actual media file instead of using hyperlinks, for this exact reason.
Funnily enough, the author's webpage for this game mentions it was in the "Fear of Twine" exhibition, presumably an exhibition of Twine games. I went to fearoftwine.com and oh look, the domain has expired. Thankfully, WebArchive had my back and I can see the whole site with this link, though it's less a site and more a short interactive Twine page with links to other Twine games. There are even some I recognize. I might make an entry for it later.
Back to the game itself. It consists of two "worlds", for lack of a better word. One is a normal and horrifically boring office where you work your call center job doing customer support. The other is an alternate office that (Spoiler - click to show)slowly disappears over time, with words replaced by commas and periods until the entire thing is an expanse of nothing. It's a cool effect, but I'm sure it would've worked much better if the Youtube videos were actually functional. I agree that it resembles Degeneracy, but here (Spoiler - click to show)the switch between the two worlds, the normal world and the blank decaying one, is periodic and occurs every minute or so, without any way to stop it. And letting it continue to the end is how you win.
Hope I didn't miss anything with that review. It's possible that I was supposed to notice some awesome detail that was completely erased along with the Youtube videos.
Your daring foray into the abandoned industrial sector near downtown was just an experiment to see if you could catch sight of one of the new cryptids that had invaded your world just a few years past. Only a glimpse, and new respect (and possibly riches) would be yours!
Well, we all know how that's going to go for our poor protagonist...
Except we don't. Because all of a sudden, you get... ROMANCE options?! Yes, this is a bit of a dating sim. The heart on the cover might've spoiled that for you, but it didn't sink in for me until I saw the "dating" options and thought, oh.
So this is a quite bizarre game. It looks like horror on the surface, but the structure and some writing foibles scream "dating sim", even though the dating activities are less "traditional candlelight dinner" and more "run away screaming while pursued". But the mixture works better than you'd expect for a four-hour creation.
I'll be honest. I would play this if it was full-length. With great enthusiasm, even.
A bit underimplemented, as all parser SpeedIF tends to be, but charming in its own right. That last message is chilling. I'd like to complain about the stove and sink being a red herring, since I spent a while flicking them on and off fruitlessly while wondering if I was supposed to set things on fire or put them out. I did figure it out eventually, though.
Hm... on second thought, I do wonder if the (Spoiler - click to show)flashlight was real at all, or some kind of hallucination? It seemed real enough while I had it, but, well.
Anyway, haunted house stories are a favorite of mine. I liked this one. The atmosphere is great and the abandoned house is well-described. I've never been one for exploring abandoned buildings, but this game makes me want to do that (ideally without the fate that befalls this main character in particular!). A good game for rainy autumn afternoons.
Walkthrough in case someone needs it: (Spoiler - click to show)Go all the way up to the attic, turn on the fusebox, and touch the wires. Then take the flashlight to the east and try to leave the house.
A man's son starts calling him by a different name; soon he finds everyone calling him by that name, and begins to question his identity. Unsettling and presents no clear answers as to why this is happening or what the root cause is. Several possible theories: is this another entity named Yarry, pulling strings? Trying to replace him? Or is he just paranoid and a bad father? The lack of clarity on the true cause makes it great.
Thoughts on endings:
(Spoiler - click to show)The ending where you reject the name is enigmatic and ambiguous. The threat still exists, but it's so ill-defined that you don't know how to fight it. Is fighting it even possible?
The ending where you accept the name took the wind out of my sails a bit. This might just be me, but I wanted a more dramatic replacement scene, where the main character ends up an unwanted stranger in his own family's home. Or something like that. That's just personal opinion though.
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