Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

I love Chandler Groover's stories, and this one is no exception. It's minimalist but makes great use of what detail exists. Each location is vividly sketched out in a few sentences, hinting at an expansive wider setting. Loved the aesthetic as well. As usual, descriptions are lush and food is involved in a mildly horrifying way.

The puzzles are unique and charming. Last puzzle did give me some trouble, seems like I'm not the only one. Apparently (Spoiler - click to show)the merry droll-teller gives you a hint for the items you need, but I'd frozen him and couldn't remember the route to get him back. Ended up tracing the right path without collecting any items, so I had to look up the hint for solving that one.

Distinctive and playful aesthetic, charming puzzles, great ASCII art.

An old favorite, so I had to give it five stars. I like "trapped in a strange world" stories, and this one delivers. The repetition, uncanny setting, and unexplained mysteries all work great together. Eerie piano music really sets the tone. I'm also a sucker for horror and mysterious non-euclidean spaces, so this idea of a purgatorial setting with a repeating crossroads checks all the right boxes. While it's never laid out explicitly, you get the sense that you've done something horrible and that your experience is a punishment for past sins. The scene with the feather sticks out as a reference to the Egyptian weighing of the soul and an implication that the protagonist is far from innocent.

The scenes themselves are subtle and off-putting in just the right ways. The imagery—empty zoo cages, train stations, clocks stuck before midnight—drives in that sense of stasis and inescapability. The ending is a total gut punch. (Spoiler - click to show)The desire to escape is the carrot that's been luring you along the whole time, and you finally reach the ending only to realize there's no escape, and you're doomed to repeat these events forever.

No idea what Dampe the gravedigger is, but "Harvest Moon meets Ligotti" means I had to play this one. (Used Firefox, but unlike the other reviewer had no issues with links.)

Thoughts: Lovely setting with classic Porpentine weirdness. Similar structure to With Those We Love Alive, possible shared setting based on mentions of the Skull Empire, wouldn't be surprised if they share a codebase. Been ages since I've played With Those We Love Alive, but both games have the same bed-to-bed structure where you wake up, work, wander around, and go back to sleep, in a fascinating alien world that becomes less fascinating as you wear out its excitements. Then it's only mundane. Depressing, even. Repetition turns it all into mindless drudgery.

Skulljhabit is like that, (Spoiler - click to show)and when you run out of things to do your only recourse is to leave. You end up in another town, with another job not so different from the first. The more things change the more they stay the same.

The ending was anticlimactic, but in a fitting way. This game is full of anticlimax and hints at greater revelations that never actually happen. There are recurring dreams and mysterious books that don't add up to anything. Not sure if there are multiple endings, but I feel like there aren't, and that smidgen of grandeur is all you get. A strange and melancholy story.

Playtime: around 35 min