Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

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."