Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil
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This is a game about assembling a portrait by selecting one of four motifs (cat, turnip, boot, astronaut). Each time you make your selection, you see some text, and the process repeats a certain number of times until you reach an ending.
My first playthrough of this game took about five minutes, and I put that in as the time it takes to complete the game, but it's misleading since you can play many, many times and get many, many different endings. There's an ending achievement system and extra content unlocked in the "guide" (which is more like another part of the game) as you achieve more endings. Over about two hours I've found dozens of endings, and I'm sure there are more. Probably. The mechanics are purposefully obtuse. I didn't get enough sleep last night.
The writing is very abstract. For the most part it's impossible to pin down a concrete meaning to the words. It feels like modernist poetry. Or postmodernist poetry. Whatever it is, I'm not smart enough to know. Something faintly autobiographical but presented in a scattered, fragmented way. Fiction and reality juxtaposed. Snippets of a life. The repeating symbols of the cat, turnip, boot, astronaut, and wolf hovering alongside, the wolf in the gallery, which might mean something if you squint, maybe not...
There are also overarching returns to abuse, pain and trauma. It feels a bit like a nightmare, in that way.
And there's a lot of playing around with the look of default Inform menus. The standard ways of displaying Game A by Author B, Short Description C, Release D, You Have Reached Ending E, get messed with until they become part of the conceit.
The occasional passage with more clarity describes an American life, the life of someone who apparently has or had several cats, who has lived through something that might be a marriage or relationship, and mental illness and solitude, who stares out the window at night and sees the blinking lights of suburban houses... a ground truth buried in this labyrinth of images. But it's difficult to tell for sure.
I liked it, being a fan of surrealism. The sleep deprivation also might've helped, who's to say.
Finally I want to mention that in the Pactdice TTRPG setting created by Wildbow, there are locations called "Paths", extradimensional dreamrealms that can be navigated by "Finders" in a videogame-like fashion. By completing the right steps, a Finder can beat a Path (like beating a game) and receive a reward. But the Paths are also occupied by the Wolf, the manifestation of your personal trauma, who wants to torture and kill you while destroying everything you've spent your life building. It's a pretty cool setting. It has absolutely nothing to do with this game, but I was reminded of it due to the Wolf thing.
I will probably keep playing this and may update the review if I unlock anything that explains more.
An excerpt:
Natural Nature
A spiraling fancy by Kim I. Colburns
Release V / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D
You're ruining everything.
Throne Room
Are you a good kid? A good little person?
All night you have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
(*C*) cat dreaming of wolves
(*T*) turnip at the she-wolf's breast (times incorporated: 1)
(*B*) underwater footprint
(*A*) martian canal hobo (times incorporated: 2)
>b
It doesn't hurt.
Stop yelling!
It doesn't hurt
much
*** The Lithium Makes Your Blood Bitter ***
Just try to enjoy it.
Is it worth continuing on?, April 3, 2025The basic mechanic of this game is fascinating. There's an infinite number of "pages", some pages have text, and you can only change which page you are on by clicking a plus or minus button. No flipping ahead, and importantly, no way of telling when you're done. Is there more? Should you continue on? Is it worth continuing on?
That last question is crucial, since this game is also, as the description indicates, about suicide. The symbolism is inherent in the gameplay. To even reach the first bits of text, you need to first click through many pages of darkness. There's a lot of black space, and moments where you're alone with your own feelings, uncertain, clicking a button over and over again without knowing if you should really keep trying. The game itself comments on this.
This is the game.
...
It's fucking boring.
...
Don't tell me it gets better.
The repetition reminds me of Skulljhabit, another one of Porpentine's games, which also makes use of dull routine broken up by startling encounters with the new. But the format is highly unique, like nothing I've seen before, and I'm not sure how to describe it. Does this count as "location-based"? Is each page a location? In which case this world must be a dead one, containing as much emptiness as it does.
Some pages contain excerpts of news articles, some contain fragmented essays or diary entries, and some contain elegies for people who are long gone. Some describe surreal and fantastical environments. Some have suicide notes.
A few excerpts:
Dark apartment room. Smells like rotting food. The stain of a woman on the wall, grease patterns frozen in contortions of great pain.
---
Acceptable delusions for trapped people:
-tested by God
-emitting pheromone that marks oneself for cruelty
-cursed
-no one would treat a human being this way therefore i am not human
-i deserved to be treated this way
---
It began late last year while Rebecca was attending Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland
...
For more than a year...15 middle-school children...urged her to kill herself
...
Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide.
...
She then changed her online username from Rebecca to “That Dead Girl” and left her phone on her bed.
---
We cut ourselves, starve ourselves, blame ourselves, kill ourselves.
Oppression removes its fingerprints by forcing us to use the knife on ourselves. Self-harm is harm.
...
They try to explain away our pain with vague gestures at mental illness, hysteria, some magical disease we acquired that couldn't possibly be explained by the fact that you dehumanizedrapedabusedharassedgaslitostracizedliedbeattorturedmutilated us.
...
Creating the circumstances by which one is forced to contemplate their own death is a form of violence.
---
When you see a person, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is least human and 10 is most human.
...
You already do that anyways.
The end result is a hybrid of fiction, game, and memoir.
There are times when the basic rules change, which further complicates the "linear" structure. Certain links will jump you to a specific page, for example, and these links aren't always two-way.
One section told me I wasn't allowed to breathe until I reached its end. I remember that panicky, trapped feeling.
The game went a long time on this site without reviews. Today I decided to replay it after months and write the first review. I found it affecting.
“We aren’t in Denmark! This is not Hamlet!”
“We are in Denmark,” Horatio speaks up stonily, meeting your irate gaze. “I have lived in Elsinore’s arms my entire life, and I will die in them.”
“How could we be in Denmark?! None of us are speaking Danish!” you retort, ticking off your arguments on your fingers. “We’re all speaking modern English, with American accents! You’re experiencing a...a mass hallucination, or something.”
“How else would we speak?”
Mild unmarked spoilers ahead. Bigger spoilers will be marked.
This story is unhinged in a good way. It is, as my title says, technically a self-insert fanfiction of Hamlet, but with much more tragic gravitas than that description implies. You play as an Asian-American college student in the middle of Covid (not a great situation to be in), writing an English essay about Hamlet at your parents' home during quarantine. Then you get isekai'd. You're now in the world of Hamlet, with a twist: it's after the ending of the play. Everyone is dead and there's only Horatio and Fortinbras to talk to, at least initially. But the political situation keeps developing, and to make matters worse, (Spoiler - click to show)there's a strange sickness afoot...
The execution blends reality and fantasy well. In particular I thought the (Spoiler - click to show)addition of Covid into the story worked really well, partly because it activates the part of me that likes to read historical/fictional isekai stories on Spacebattles and think about the disastrous results of outside context problems, but also because it's genuinely an intriguing idea and well-handled. The ambiguity of the scenario, and the complexity of (Spoiler - click to show)you working to cure the plague while being the person who brought it back in the first place, creating conditions just like the ones you "escaped" from, which contributes to the burgeoning civil war... all great morally grey stuff to chew on.
The main downside for me was that the story wrapped up far quicker than I was expecting. From scene-by-scene gameplay with dialogue, I was suddenly moved to a summary of my later life in the world of Hamlet and then an ending: (Spoiler - click to show)I got the "True Good Ending" where I created penicilin and devoted myself to medical work, but was never able to return home. It was a well-written ending, don't get me wrong, and I love when isekais dwell on (Spoiler - click to show)how the protagonist begins to forget their old home, but all the same, what I got felt a bit like the opening of something longer that got cut short.
I still really liked it anyway, and gave it four stars because I have a soft spot for isekais. Don't ask me how many trashy RoyalRoad stories I've read.
Side notes:
1 - I like that the protagonist's last name is randomly selected from a list of Asian-American last names. I gave the protagonist my own first name, for that classic self-insert flair, and seeing that first name paired with a variety of last names made me think about all the other versions of me fate could have created and that kinda thing. It works well with the character creation in general, emphasizing that not just one but many people lived through situations like this, terrified about their families' safety and frightened at the racial violence and harassment suffered by many innocents for something outside their control. The line quoted below, where the protagonist is terrified of being the victim of a racist assault, sticks with me:
I don’t want to clutch some stranger’s hand while I bleed out on a supermarket floor and beg them to get my grandparents to safety and tell the cop everything that happened—to swear on God (the capital G for Jesus one, not the lowercase one we throw around for emphasis at home) in my most perfect English that I didn’t do anything but exist between the oranges and apples and maybe glance the wrong way with my chinky eyes, and please, officer, we’re just out getting groceries and our parents are waiting at home and our grandparents don’t speak English very well, I’ll translate for them—
2 - The protagonist is similar to and different from me in interesting ways. I also had to write an essay on Hamlet in a college English class, though it wasn't during Covid quarantine. For the record, I got a B on that essay and was salty about it for a while. I'm not a very big fan of Hamlet to this day.
One of the biggest differences is that the protagonist knew people who died from Covid and is thereby much more affected by it, while I was privileged enough to never get the illness, never be threatened by it, and never know anyone who died from it. I personally don't have many negative memories of quarantine, but only because I'm lucky enough to not be among those who were severely hurt or killed.
3 - There's timed text in this game, but on my replay I ran into some issues. Once after the first "Act Five, Scene Two." appeared, the next line didn't appear even after I waited for minutes. I figured out you could avoid that issue by not clicking anything while you wait for the timed text to show up. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
After that, I decided to ignore the Call to Adventure this time and was eventually presented with a blue link that made the words "Go, bid the soldiers shoot," flash onto the screen. No matter how many times I clicked the link, it just made the same text flash over and over, and I couldn't fix it. I eventually realized you had to click a link in the diagonal red text that appears several paragraphs before the blue link to progress, which is counterintuitive.
I got the Bad End in my second playthrough. The other review here says that at least one of the endings lets you return to reality, but since I don't feel like playing another time, I guess my character is just stuck in Hamlet forever.
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.
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