Ratings and Reviews by TestTubeHuman

This is a very short, very worthwhile horror story. There are no choices, but it has an impeccable atmosphere. Made for the Neo-Twiny jam in under 500 words, it takes barely any time to play and features awesome animations handdrawn by the creator. A hybrid of interactive fiction and a short horror animation you might find on Youtube or somesuch.

The story is surreal and open-ended in all the right ways. I recommend it.

From a comment I left on itch.io:

My theory about what happened is that (Spoiler - click to show)Malhar and Isabella were affected by some kind of anomalous effect, maybe the titular "Nihilist Syndrome", derived from a glitch in reality. The protagonist seems to be a computer scientist lecturing about computer memory, and the story places an emphasis on how contaminated data can result from improper memory allocation, causing incorrect behavior in the program, because the program is unable to distinguish between "real" and "false" data. To the computer, it's all real. "It'll run your program with those junk variables exactly as it's programmed to do, even if it destroys itself in the process." Malhar and Isabella were either real students who were contaminated and then erased by this junk data, or they were never real in the first place, solely products of junk data in reality that were then erased by some kind of reality garbage collector.

"Nothing about them was recognizable anymore-just a complete... deconstruction of the body..." By the time the universe gets to erasing them, they've been affected enough that people can no longer recognize them as human. It spreads to the area around them as well, affecting the cleanup process while their bodies are disposed of. People are incapable of reacting to their deaths, as if a mental block prevents them from acknowledging the glitch in reality. It also seems the glitch caused the professor's dwindling lecture attendance.

At the end, it's as if the students never existed. Either an antimemetic effect, or the cleanup made it so they retroactively never existed in the first place, except in the computer scientist's mind.

Reminds me of oldschool SCPs, in a good way.

I played this game more than a year ago, for Spring Thing 2024, but never got to publishing this review til I found it lying on my hard drive just now. Most of the review contains major spoilers due to the nature of the game, which I hid behind the spoiler block.

So you're part of a crime family and there's (Spoiler - click to show)a home intruder entering your apartment to kill you. Survive! It reminds me of a few other games I've seen on IFDB but haven't necessarily played. I know there's one where somebody enters your apartment with murderous intentions, and gameplay consists of setting up traps to kill them before they reach you.

This one is easier, since you can walk around the apartment while the intruder's there. Even after he enters the space you're in, you still get one turn to move somewhere else. So evading the guy is as easy as standing in one place and moving somewhere else if he comes over. The intruder is cleverly programmed, but I didn't dealing with him much of a challenge. Of course, then you have to deal with passively standing in a room while you listen to him take all your stuff, which is aggravating to say the least. Hey, you can't just take my phone and laptop. Those are mine! Sure, I couldn't figure out a way to unlock the phone (which is maddening, since there has to be a correct password hidden somewhere in the game and I couldn't find it) but that phone still belongs to me.

Another thing: part of me wonders if the intruder is real at all. There's the quote at the end of the game, for one:

"Your eyes snap open. The intruder has not yet opened the door. You slip out of bed, then head towards the counter.

You can do this."

This implies that it's all happening in the protagonist's imagination. Also the part where you have to survive the intrusion is told in future tense, not present, and seems to be what the protagonist is imagining will happen instead of what actually will happen. We don't see the intruder himself in-game. Sure, we imagine him killing us, but that's not the same as actually dying. It's why you get infinite attempts to survive.

I dunno. I discovered four endings: I where you get murdered, III where you wait it out evading the guy, IV where you attack him with a comforter so you can tie him up and interrogate him later, and V where you straight up kill him.

But my real question is what about Brookwood? Because get this: Brookwood is the person who set up this apartment for you, seemingly, and gave you the phone that you can't open because the password's incorrect, and gave you the safe that the intruder somehow knows the combination to. Is Brookwood pulling some double cross dagger-in-the-back schtick here? Because SOMEONE must've told the guy what the safe combination was, and there's only one other person mentioned in game who would know, I think. Of course, the other possibility is that the intruder doesn't exist and it's all imagination and paranoia. Who knows.

Anyway, it's a fun game. The introduction was really tedious, though. I get that it's supposed to capture the tedium of moving into a new apartment and dealing with chores, to some extent, but it took ages to get past and I didn't find it that helpful for teaching me the apartment's layout compared to the actually fun part of the game. That, plus the general ease of victory, are my main reasons for the three star rating.

It's still clear that an incredible amount of effort was put into this game, and the NPC behavior is exquisitely programmed.