Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

I found this game while looking for games about (Spoiler - click to show)insects, body horror, infestation, that kind of thing. So the story, which some other reviews call a mystery plot, was obvious to me from the get-go. I found it solid and entertainingly told. Also not very original, but who needs originality when you've got (Spoiler - click to show)INSECT PARASITES?! That burrow under your skin and live inside you?!

Clears throat.

Anyway. What this game really is missing is well-clued puzzles. Good puzzles, really. I'm the exception among this game's existing reviewers on IFDB in that I thought the puzzles weren't very well done and ran into guess-the-verb errors a few times. In particular, I got stuck because I kept trying to (Spoiler - click to show)"loosen screws with butterknife" instead of "loosen painting with butterknife"... even though the painting is secured to the wall by the screws.

The navigation is also somewhat confusing. (Spoiler - click to show)You start outside the house, then go inside the house, and in classic fashion the door magically locks behind you. Alright. But what's unintuitive and underclued is that you'll eventually need to go outside the house by opening the bathroom window and going down a tree. Then you won't be able to get back in because of the magically locked front door, so you'll need to go east of the van into the woods, navigate a rather boring maze, and then you end up back in the cemetary. The process is made easier after you find Daisy and get her key, which works on the front door, but boy howdy is it annoying at first.

The endgame in general I found really unintuitive, to the point where I had to read the actual source code of this game to figure out what I was supposed to do. Thankfully the source code is available, otherwise I'd never have beaten this. But I've never played the game that this game is apparently based on, so some of the commands were just plain nonsensical. (Spoiler - click to show)How was I supposed to know to "push cabinet" in the kitchen? And "rub algae with towel" in the moist basement, to reveal the brick, was unintuitive for me. And don't even get me started on "open crypt with shovel" to "take slime" , or "pour gasoline on self", which I had to look at the source code to figure out. Maybe it's because I don't play enough oldschool parsers. I dunno.

The fact that this game is based on another, older one also explains the large number of items lying around that pretty much don't do anything. The pitcher or dagger, for example. I didn't like having those red herrings around and taking up space in my inventory.

But since there's still an interesting story hidden underneath all this, here's a walkthrough so that you, if anyone's even reading this, don't have to suffer like I did.

(Spoiler - click to show)
in
open door
n
w
open cabinet
take matches
x sink
take butterknife
e
read note
n
take candle
light candle
l
look under rug
take keys
s
e
read second note
l
open door
w
up
w
w
n
read third note
s
e
e
n
n
n
x painting
loosen painting with butterknife
take painting
press button
n
read book
s
s
s
up
e
x chest
open chest
look in chest
l
x camera
push camera west
switch on camera
take sledgehammer
down
n
n
e
x body
take towel
open window
e
down
s
unlock van
open van
in
take gasoline
x monitor
out
e
n
n
w
w
take shovel
open door with shovel
in
x slime
touch slime
x self
out
open gate
s
e
w
w
up
n
up
open trap door
climb ladder
x daisy
talk to daisy
z
z
l
take key
read fourth note
down
s
down
w
push cabinet
w
down
s
x flower
smell flower
take flower
rub algae with towel
take brick
unlock keyhole
down
down
n
x joe
talk to joe
z
z
throw flower at joe
hit joe with sledgehammer
x seal
hit seal with sledgehammer
i
blow out candle
drop all
l
take matches
pour gasoline on self
drop gasoline can
n
x queen
light matches

YOU WIN!
For bonus points (read: a !FUN! ending), try going in without the gasoline. Or lighting the gasoline can directly.

If you look at the reviews for this game, you'll notice they say it has a lot of direct links to Youtube videos. You'll also notice this game was published in 2014. This is a bad sign. When I played, instead of the sweeping vistas I was (presumably) supposed to get, I was greeted with "This video is private." over and over again. Every time I went to a new room. Every time I clicked anything. There's a choice to look out the window, so I looked, and whoops! "This video is private." Rather gives the whole thing a different feeling than intended.

If you want to include Youtube videos in a game, I would recommend directly downloading and embedding the actual media file instead of using hyperlinks, for this exact reason.

Funnily enough, the author's webpage for this game mentions it was in the "Fear of Twine" exhibition, presumably an exhibition of Twine games. I went to fearoftwine.com and oh look, the domain has expired. Thankfully, WebArchive had my back and I can see the whole site with this link, though it's less a site and more a short interactive Twine page with links to other Twine games. There are even some I recognize. I might make an entry for it later.

Back to the game itself. It consists of two "worlds", for lack of a better word. One is a normal and horrifically boring office where you work your call center job doing customer support. The other is an alternate office that (Spoiler - click to show)slowly disappears over time, with words replaced by commas and periods until the entire thing is an expanse of nothing. It's a cool effect, but I'm sure it would've worked much better if the Youtube videos were actually functional. I agree that it resembles Degeneracy, but here (Spoiler - click to show)the switch between the two worlds, the normal world and the blank decaying one, is periodic and occurs every minute or so, without any way to stop it. And letting it continue to the end is how you win.

Hope I didn't miss anything with that review. It's possible that I was supposed to notice some awesome detail that was completely erased along with the Youtube videos.