Ratings and Reviews by TestTubeHuman

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.

This may just be me, but I liked the 'fall into a deep depression' part much more than the (Spoiler - click to show)'friend comes in and magically uplifts you out of your deep depression' part. Probably it's just me. But the ending seems incongruously upbeat when coupled with the very bleak beginning. I really enjoyed the beginning, though. Captures that process of withdrawing from the world.

It's a short game, so if you think you'd like it, I'd encourage you to play it yourself.

You don't know where you are. You don't know how you got here. All you know is a persistent, smothering BLACKNESS that feels at once claustrophobic and terrifyingly VAST.

A companion piece to Bogleech's Don't Get Spooked!, featuring the lovely creatures known as magboils, though they aren't named in the story. Much shorter and more lightly implemented than Don't Get Spooked!, but still a good example of Bog's creepy-charming style. You find yourself in a strange, dark place, accosted by a pale Gollum-like creature with maggots in its eyes. Will you help it or kill it?

There's only one good ending, but several interesting ways to die. And as expected for Bog, there are images on every page showing you the magboil in its, ahem, beauty. (Though I've seen so many of these creatures in Bog's other works that I've grown to like them. I even think they're cute.) The game is nothing special, but it has the right blend of surrealism and horror, leaving enough ambiguous for your imagination to make up the rest.

Playtime: ~5min, more if you want to find all the different endings.

Fun fact: Magboils are part of Bog's original setting, based on, of all things, a set of shifty bootleg plastic toys from a Chinese wholesale market. (This page on his site has more on their origin, and it's just as funny as his other articles. Highlight: Again, the mouth is one of the most endearing features. In Milburn's case, little more than a depression in his bulbous visage, grown over with a membrane of skin. As bloated insect larvae twist and roll in the juices that were once his brain, Milburn can only scream silently behind a prison of his own flesh, filling me with a sense of nostalgia for early childhood.)

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."