Reviews by Cerfeuil

This game captures a moment with careful attention to detail. It's not a situation I've ever been in - the morning after a one-night stand with your coworker - but through the game we can peek into it and into the characters' lives, getting a sense of who they are. It's a very casual moment - no tension, no high stakes, just two people the day after a fling. The dynamics between them are somewhere between awkward and intimate. They know each other almost, but not quite. They're not entirely sure where their relationship stands now, and they're navigating new waters.

Appreciated the attention to detail in the woman's room, with the goth decor and her middle-school love of emo music. Or the randomly selected emo band you can talk about. Similar attention is paid to the protagonist - they're clearly a defined character, not just a blank slate. I like that they have a prosthetic leg and former ambitions of being an artist, which you can discuss briefly.

My criticism, I guess, is that the description says "try to convince [your abrasive coworker] to stay in bed just a little longer", which made me think there'd be more conflict in the game. I was expecting more pushiness from the protagonist, maybe some commentary on social pressures surrounding relationships, but there was a surprising lack of that. Seeing more points of tension with the relationship - how long have they known each other, do the other coworkers know, does the boss know, what do they really think about each other? - might make the story more interesting. You can pick various terms for the woman, from "lover" to "colleague" to "rival", but they don't seem to affect the narrative that I could tell? A touch of conflict could make the game more engaging. As studies in mood and character go, though, this is nice.

Playtime: < 15 minutes

I'm the one who submitted The Unholy City to Shufflecomp. It's a "song" (though more like a spoken poem set to music) from Thomas Ligotti, a severely depressed horror author with a severely depressing worldview. (TLDR: he thinks life is pointless and consciousness is a curse, a viewpoint maybe understandable when you live with devastating anhedonia and anxiety for decades on end.) With this game, there are now three Thomas Ligotti-inspired games on IFDB: Skulljhabit, this, and a third one called The Crooked Estate I admittedly haven't played. We're growing the Thomas Ligotti fan community, guys. At this rate we'll have 10 whole Ligotti-inspired games on IFDB by the end of the century!

In the game itself, you progress through a sequence of scenes relating to daily life, which start off normal and rapidly descend into horror. Eventually, inevitably, you end up drawn into the Unholy City. The city itself is never described - each scene ends with you "entering" it. There's only one ending I could find, which of course doesn't result in your escape.

Playing while familiar with the original song is a fun experience. There were moments that I could pick out as being directly inspired by the song, or drawing on it more strongly than other parts. I noted the mundane workaday nature of the scenes, at least at the outset. Before Ligotti became a horror author he was, by his own admission, a severely depressed anhedonic working an office job at a publishing company and having violent fantasies about murdering his coworkers. To say he hates corporate America and everything it represents would be pretty accurate. If you look at his larger worldview and body of work, it's clear that the Unholy City represents all of reality, or perhaps the state of existing as something conscious and capable of suffering. (Though one of the best things about his horror stories is, unlike his nonfiction, they're open to interpretation. You could view it as a real place, if you wanted to.) Knowing that, it seems to me that the game protagonist can't escape the Unholy City because they're already in it, and you can only leave through death. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

The game itself is short, so not incredibly expansive, but has a neat little collection of scenes. If I had any criticism to offer, it'd be that I wish there was more! Would be fun to see this concept taken to more extremes.

Out of all the inkJam 2023 games, this one is my favorite by far. It features a wildly innovative mechanic: you turn on your webcam, and through some facial recognition magic it detects when you blink and factors that into the gameplay. The setting is a dream labyrinth of sorts, and the world changes whenever you blink. A pond melts and freezes, a north-south path lined with skulls becomes an east-west path lined with lanterns, and so on.

All the overlapping worlds brought to mind Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin, another game where you can navigate parallel versions of reality. But Dual Transform relied entirely on good old parser commands, while the blinking in this game is a hundred times cooler. (Sorry, Andrew Plotkin.)

Seriously, words can't express how cool this is. The experience of seeing something different every time you close your eyes and re-open them is incredibly surreal, and really sells the shifting dreamscape where you can never be sure what's under your feet. There's even music and background animations to build up the atmosphere. For a jam game, this has an crazy level of polish.

The puzzles are simple, but make great use of the mechanic. You'll quickly learn when to blink and when not to blink as you navigate the labyrinth, and balancing your intentional blinks with your unintentional blinks is great fun. A whole new dimension of control given to the player.

Quibbles I had: the obstacle in the fourth challenge killed me three times (you'll know it when you see it), and every time you die you return to the beginning and have to do everything again. Making it past the fourth challenge, I was excited to reach the fifth and then promptly died another unceremonious death. There's apparently a good ending, but I don't feel like navigating the labyrinth again to find it. The abrupt ending is probably an artifact of the time limit, since this was made in (only!) 72 hours. If an expanded version's ever released, I'll be sure to check it out.

TLDR: highly recommend.

(If you have issues with the blink detection, make sure you're close enough to the webcam. You can also simulate blinking with the spacebar, but the experience isn't quite the same without the camera.)

[Written July 2023 with very minor revision October 2024.]

I love this game. I've played it three times and will probably play again someday. I will now ramble on about the story and vaguely related topics for a bit, don't mind me.

It's a mess of a game, honestly. There are three viewpoint characters you jump between, plus expositional interludes. There are bits in first, second and third person all mixed together. The author said this started out as a poetry project before turning into a Twine game at a friend's suggestion, which makes sense. It feels like an unfinished poetry project. Dreamy, disjointed and surreal, which fits the vibe anyway, so it works out in the end. And eventually you get a handle on the story, despite the very in media res beginning. The game does have a well-defined plot and setting. It's sketched out gradually, filling itself in as you progress. And there are parts that took my breath away.

But I haven't mentioned the setting yet! The setting is a post-scarcity utopia and hands down my favorite part. I may be obsessed with post-scarcity utopias, so this is where my "review" plummets straight into subjectivity and unrelated nonsense. Here we go.

First, if you're not sure what I'm talking about, you're probably more sane than I am. Here's a primer from Wikipedia: "Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely."

Wikipedia makes it sound boring, but it's not. In a post-scarcity society, you can have almost anything you want. No poverty, no wars over limited resources, no working a job you hate to make ends meet, actually no jobs at all because usually, like in Consciousness Hologram, AIs and automation do the work for everyone. Which means there's no money or capitalism, something something fully automated luxury gay space communism something something. The utopia part comes pretty easily after that.

Star Trek is the most well-known example of a post-scarcity society according to this article. In Star Trek, "replicators" can create anything a person might need, from food to housing. Quote: "There's no longer any necessity to work to sustain oneself. Machines complement our work as humans and allow us to escape the most dreadful effects of scarcity. Poverty, hunger, all that."

Now, I haven't actually watched Star Trek. My post-scarcity utopia of choice is this book series called The Culture by Iain M. Banks which has a very detailed Wikipedia article written by some extremely obsessive fan or other that explains everything about the setting you could possibly want to know and is also a great series (cough cough read Player of Games cough cough). The short version: The Culture is an anarchist utopia where superintelligent AIs do everything and life is perfect, you can freely modify your own biology which includes getting high on futuristic non-addictive drugs or changing your gender at will just because, and did I mention that there is no capitalism and everything is free and life is perfect. So.

This series, by the way, is basically the Bible of a certain group of transhumanists on the Internet who are totally convinced that self-modifying superintelligent AI can usher humanity into the next era of the future and create a perfect utopia through singularity or whatever. I personally don't believe that, as the saying goes "the singularity is just the rapture for nerds", but the people who do have some interesting ideas. Seriously you should check out LessWrong and the associated "rationalist" community if you ever get the chance. It's a great Internet rabbit hole to burn a few hours on. Or more than a few hours. You could dedicate your life to it, like some people have done joining those Berkeley polycules or whatever they get up to in California.

Obligatory rationalism reference aside, and trust me I think about these people more than I should, I liked this game because it reminded me of that stuff. The author's essay at the end notes transhumanists David Pearce and Brian Tomasik as inspirations, and they're pretty aligned with the general LessWrong transhumanist philosophy. (If you look at David Pearce's website, he's written long essays on how we can and must use technology to eliminate all suffering from the universe, I don't believe it but it's fascinating stuff. Here's an essay he wrote about why the setting of Brave New World isn't so bad actually, if you want something to start with). The ending essay really helps put it all in context, and explains a lot about what actually happens during the game. The sequel, Universal Hologram, clarifies even more plot points just in case you weren't sure about what happened (and might spend too much time doing that to the detriment of its own plot, which I'll touch on in a Universal Hologram review if I ever get around to writing that).

So how does this futuristic post-scarcity AI utopia stuff actually relate to the story of Consciousness Hologram? There's two parts to it, methinks:

Part 1, le epic escapist paradise: There's a stereotype of leet gamerz who like playing fantasy video games where they get to adventure with friends because they don't have that in real life, in real life they're unwashed basement NEETs with anime posters. But a true utopia like Consciousness Hologram or The Culture takes that up to eleven. In these settings people are basically hippies who do whatever they want and it's the ultimate escapist dream if you're stuck in 21st century Earth being a depressed shut-in or something. The ultimate maximalist fantasy. Not only is your life perfect, but everybody's life is perfect. There are no more problems forever. All the problems have been taken care of. So you can go lounge on the cosmic beach and drink your perfectly calibrated pina coladas until the end of all time.

It's great fun to imagine when you feel horrible. "Oh, but what if life was perfect and we all lived in a utopia or something." You know. That this idea captivates me as much as it does probably says a lot about me, but don't dwell on that.

Anyway.

Part 2, when le epic escapist paradise actually sucks: The best utopian novels are good not just because of the cool utopia parts, but because they pay attention to the potential negative ramifications. A utopia wouldn't be interesting if you just made everything 100% awesome all the time. You need issues to center a story around. You need your characters to be human to some extent, otherwise they would be utterly alien and unrelatable. And that means their perfect lives can't be completely perfect. No inserting magic electrodes into your brain to live out the rest of your life in unimaginable happiness all the time (aka "wireheading"), you need experiences the reader can somewhat understand.

The ending essay has a segment where the author says Consciousness Hologram sprouted from the idea of conceptualizing your ideal utopia, and then trying to imagine how you could still be miserable there, even though everything would be so much better than your actual life. And that's where the setting shines. In its misery, something the humans of this setting can't get rid of entirely no matter how hard they try. Maybe it's necessary. Or maybe it's fundamentally human and living without it is impossible.

You can do anything you feel like doing in this story but there's no point to it, so often you end up doing nothing. Everything feels sterile, all the people you interact with are barely people. The protagonist's interactions with (Spoiler - click to show)Morton, where they keep failing to meet up because everyone's taking centuries-long naps in hibernation pods, are hilarious and also a great case of that missing human connection. Nobody and nothing feels real, to the point where people like (Spoiler - click to show)James need violence and death to disturb that horrible endless monotony.

These are ideas that get explored in Consciousness Hologram and the Culture novels and some other essays I'll mention now, because I can't shut up.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a somewhat famous rationalist who is the guru of LessWrong and also known for writing Harry Potter fanfiction (no seriously), does AI research and is very concerned with the possibility of self-modifying superintelligent AI creating a utopia or destroying the world. (He's also mentioned The Culture as an inspiration, so we're kind of in the same boat except for the part where he takes ultra AI god utopias as a serious possibility and I don't.) Some people worship him, others think he's a crank, I'm more inclined towards the second than the first, but he's written some interesting essays and other things besides Harry Potter fanfiction. (I have also read his Harry Potter fanfiction. It's not terrible. Really. But I'm getting distracted again.)

Here's an interesting essay series Yudkowsky's written. It's called Fun Theory. It's about the particulars of designing a utopia that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering without wireheading, which most people don't actually want. While the individual essays are mixed quality, some are pretty neat. In "Eutopia is Scary" and "Building Weirdtopia", Yudkowsky says that a perfect world where nothing goes wrong ever and everyone is happy all the time is boring, from a writing perspective. But add a little twist to it, make it fulfilling while still being radically different and better than real life, and you make it very interesting. In "Eutopia is Scary", Yudkowsky also says there's no reason not to expect the future to be bizarre and unfathomable, just like how our modern life in the 21st century would be horrifically strange to people who lived ten thousand years ago.

Consciousness Hologram does a perfect job of capturing that. These people are vaguely familiar, but so much about them is unrecognizable, compared to being a human in the 21st century. At the same time, the contours of the utopian setting are captured through the very recognizable ennui of the protagonist. Through the familiar first-world juxtaposition of having everything you need and still being unsatisfied with it—and you're not sure if it's because there's something wrong with you, or something wrong with the world.

In short, this game combines loads of neat speculative fiction concepts into one zany wacko package that never goes the direction you expect. And the atmosphere is great. Those glass pyramids on Mars, man.

A beautiful and marvelously strange setting to explore.

---

Anyway. End unhinged rambling about Yudkowsky and Banks. Maybe in the end the only reason I liked this as much as I did was because I've read all the Culture novels and wanted more. (Except Inversions. I never got around to Inversions.)

But whatever.

Right now this game has five ratings and only two reviews, including mine. Like many games on this site I think it's criminally underrated. Which is why this long "review" exists I guess. Play this game cmon it's good

I'm a bit biased in my rating here, since this game is based on one of the prompts I submitted to Seedcomp. More specifically, a list of my own dreams. There are few things cooler and trippier than playing through a game featuring your own dreams, where you get to travel through expanded versions of your own dreamworlds that have been incorporated into a larger story (and a delightfully creepy one to boot). There were so many moments where I said to myself "Hey, I recognize this place!" or "Pairing these dreams is a great idea, they work together so well". Really fun stuff.

Gameplay's pretty typical: explore, take everything that isn't nailed down, use it to open doors and solve puzzles. The puzzles are good, making use of the environment in interesting ways. Took me about an hour and a half to get the true/bad ending, since I spent half an hour stuck not finding the gloves. Though that's probably my fault for not thinking to (Spoiler - click to show)open the kitchen cabinets. Some kind of hint that you need to do that would be nice, but maybe I'm just dumb. Besides that it was smooth sailing. Was really obvious that you needed to (Spoiler - click to show)give the meat to the fly, I just had to find the gloves, and then riding the fly up to the top of the tower is really fun. Good game.

Tiny quibbles: some of the things you can do could be better signposted—e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)entering the two cars involved in the car accident, and the schoolbus on Error Avenue—it'd help if it was made more obvious that you can go inside. Also, (Spoiler - click to show)Tiff and Jen can have the argument about whether or not to free the dad even after you've freed him. Happened for me when I freed him and then went to the living room.

I found three endings: (Spoiler - click to show)the one where you wake up before you free the dad, the one where Claire dies, and the one where you wake up after. There might be more endings, but I'm not sure how to get them. There were definitely events and things that I found and couldn't figure out how to do anything with. A list:
(Spoiler - click to show)
- The cool schoolbus mannequin sequence. Really trippy, loved that bit.
- I never figured out the point of tying things (though untying is necessary to free the dad) or crawling under things, two verbs the guide says are important.
- You can take the uncanny pillow and uncanny blanket, but I never figured out if they had a purpose, either.
- Taking photos is fun, but I'm not sure what it does? (Would be nice to have a list of all the things you photographed after ending the game, or something.)
- The entire point of the bicycle? Thought it might be needed for an escape sequence, but never ended up doing anything with it.
- Why can you pet the fly but if you try to hug it Claire tells you it's gross? This is an atrocity against flyhood, giant fly friend is cute please let the player hug it. If Claire can ride the fly to the top of the tower she should be able to hug it. Feed it treats. Give it a name. You know, Pokemon style.


But again, these are tiny quibbles. The overall experience was great, and I'd recommend this game to anyone who likes bizarre and unsettling dream adventures.

Random side note: The concept seriously reminds me of the Paths from the Pactverse setting. In short, Paths are game-like dream realms you can explore and get rewarded for upon completion, while failure leads to horrible death or worse. There's a bunch of TTRPG documents about them, including a list of canonical and fanmade Paths that's fun reading if you have some time to spare. I've always thought they were perfect game material and this game is what I've always wanted in terms of a Path-like text adventure.

I loved this one when I was younger. The first time I played it, years ago, I think I cried. But playing it again, it's much worse than I remember. It's odd how time can reverse your opinions.

The concept: Russian-American artist commits suicide. You learn about his life through the eyes of four different people visiting a posthumous exhibition of his paintings. Creative idea, unique and meta.

But the writing simply isn't good enough to produce the effect the author wanted to achieve. I found the character voices flat and one-dimensional. At times they degenerate into stereotypes. The college student was my least favorite. I remember even in my original playthrough, I was annoyed by her unjustified hatred of the artist, Russians, and men in general. She's a straw feminist, who despite being a humanities major (all the humanities majors I know are extremely passionate about their field of study) demonstrates no appreciation for art or her university education. I found her character shallow. "Boomer caricacture of SJW college student" shallow.

The other characters are similar. Of course the art critic is snooty and pretentious, of course the wife is a meek simple country woman. Even the paintings themselves don't grab me, maybe because the mediocre writing makes for mediocre mental images. And the metaphors are basic. The artist was going through Hell, so he painted Hell, look at these pictures of Orpheus and so on. The artist had a difficult relationship with religion, so here's a painting of a church covered in insects. His last painting, of a noose, was found on his easel after he hanged itself. Too on-the-nose for me.

The pictures suffer from simultaneously too much and too little description: often there's so much going on that the author can barely describe it all. The author is so caught up with character voice that the descriptions mix in with them and you never get a clear picture of the art you're looking at, even though the art is a central point of the game.

And the writing just isn't good enough. Some of the wording is awkward. Characters speak in voice until they don't, so the game can provide you with directions and tell you where the exits are. The painting descriptions have minor missteps, like:

> However, Domokov has done amazing and confusing tricks with perspective, similar to "Cornucopium".

That "done" doesn't sound right to me. It feels inelegant, and uncharacteristic of a learned seventy-three year old critic. There are more than a few places like this in the writing, where the language feels slightly off. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm nitpicking. But this is a very text-heavy piece, so the tiny issues stood out to me.

I wish the number of paintings was lessened, and the descriptions lengthened. With multiple paragraphs to describe a painting and the viewpoint character's reaction, the concept could work. But Finley tries to fit everything into a few sentences.

"Maudlin", as another review said, is the right word for it. In the hands of a better writer this could be a good story, but it's hamstrung by sentimentality and reliance on cliches.



Disclaimer: Since my past self was enamored with this game, clearly my less-than-complimentary opinions here are subjective. I tried to be fair, but in the end I can't change the fact that this game really didn't cut it for me on the replay. Each to their own, maybe you'd like this one, etc.

If you really hate this review, just pretend I was roleplaying as the snooty art critic or the idiot student or something.

The UI in this game is fantastic. The effort to recreate Discord's interface, right down to the typing indicators, is incredible. Also love how it switches around depending on which character you're typing as. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see Twine games do, recreating existing websites and playing with the medium in a way that makes full use of Twine's HTML capabilities and the potential of web fiction in general. Great stuff.

The plot, however, I have some quibbles with. The topic is dark, it's interesting, and it's treated with the gravity it deserves. But as a person who's been in a few close-knit Discord servers, I feel like what the story is missing is a real sense of community with more fleshed-out characters. Since the game is so short, we don't have time to get a sense of who any of the characters are. Name, age, gender, and some vague descriptors is pretty much it. None of them have the time to feel like real people. We don't get to see how the community works and what things were like before the revelations came out, which deadens the impact of it all. We're told that Cornelius is admired and respected more than we're shown that. We only see him (Spoiler - click to show)being a creep, and I guessed that he was a predator almost immediately. It wasn't a surprise at all. I think if there was more detail on the specifics of these people and more on what things were like before it all went down, more of a gradual reveal that there's something wrong with this guy, it would make the revelations and the decision to dissolve the group at the end much more impactful.

Also wish there was more choice involved, though I'm not sure how. I only played once, but there doesn't seem to be a broad range of choices. It's either (Spoiler - click to show)"tell everyone what Cornelius did" or "don't", and what sane person wouldn't pick the first option? I get that in real life there are various reasons people wouldn't want to, but as a reader choosing not to tell just strips you from being able to see the full narrative.

Also, and this may just be a pet peeve of mine, some of the character voices feel slightly off. The older characters especially. Their inclusion is odd in the first place because I rarely see mixed-age groups online and especially people older than 30 or 40, although this might just be a side effects of the communities I'm in. I can see it making sense here with the history of the group, though some more history and notes on how the younger members ended up joining might help. Anyway. A lot of the older characters' dialogue came across as old people talk for the sake of making them look old, i.e. dropping 'boy', and 'dear' all the time. Basically, the older characters rang the least true to me. But as I just said I have no idea how older people act in chatrooms, so who am I to talk?

It's still an interesting game, though. I liked how the flashbacks slowly revealed more of the story over time. And the escalation from (Spoiler - click to show)"Cornelius is acting off here" to "Cornelius is a straight-up predator", coupled with the drama of the car accident, unfolds well. I think if it was longer, and gave us more time to get attached to the characters, I'd feel the vibes more.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]

Disclaimer: the following review is heavily biased because I love AI and post-apocalyptic settings and especially when the two are combined, so from the outset the concept was hitting all the right notes. I mean, "post-apocalyptic AI overseeing the remnants of the world" is an idea that resonates with my soul. Plus it's based on a poem by Kit Riemer, who's one of my favorite IF authors. I fell in love immediately.

Also, the ending, as they say, ripped my heart in two.

(Spoiler - click to show)I can't believe the author had the guts to kill off the protagonist like that. I mean, what the hell? When the ending happened, I think I stared blankly at the screen for a while. Then I said to myself, "There has to be a way to avoid this." Then I replayed and discovered the game was entirely linear. None of your choices matter at all. There's no way to avoid failure.

The ending message is devastating. It really makes the game for me, knowing that no matter what you do, you can't avoid your fate. You're always going to be left dead and forgotten. At first I rankled knowing everything I'd done was meaningless, and then the more I thought about it the more I realized how perfectly tragic it was. You were doomed before the game even started. And the slow decline from setting out on your mission with purpose to falling behind and eventually dying unceremoniously is so well-paced.

It makes the greater setting, which is hinted at in just the right ways, even cooler. Throughout the game you're treated to glimpses of what might have caused the earth to become uninhabitable and where the humans went. It's tantalizing to have these sketches of the wider world you'll never know more about because you're going to die alone. And the whole story revolves around futility, so it fits.



Other stuff:

The writing's good. Not necessarily on the sentence-by-sentence level, but in the way all the lovely aphorisms are put together. The snippets of art. The odd dreams you have while in sleep mode. While not directly relevant to the plot, they resonate with the themes of death, solitude, and the search for purpose in a way I can't totally articulate.

I also couldn't avoid thinking about Kit Riemer's Consciousness Hologram and Universal Hologram. There's a scene in I think Universal Hologram where you're watching Youtube videos from thousands of years ago and the Internet, long-ascended to sentient AI status, is fruitlessly trying to explain them to you. But neither of you actually know what's going on. All this stuff has been shorn of its original meaning because so much has been destroyed, and no matter how hard you try you can't recreate it.

In short: Love how your entire existence here is for the sake of a long-gone species you can never fully understand, and love how it ends. Such a keen sense of loneliness and loss.

[Review written April 2023, edited April 2024]

Like many of Porpentine's games, the short length belies a lot of depth. Most of her games feel very personal, autobiographical in an abstract sense, and this one is no exception. The setting is a blend of futuristic sci-fi and the modern-day US. You play as a trans woman, and there are several personal vignettes about that, which feel like the author speaking directly. To afford hormones you need to sell a part of yourself, more specifically: partitioning off a part of your brain to turn one of your dreams into a simulation that will be sold to other people. This could be read as allegory for many unpleasant things. Literally selling out your dreams, for one.

There are a lot of fascinating things about this story. The dream sold is a deeply personal dream connected to your realization of your gender and who you are, and by selling it you'll never experience it again. The friend you're selling it to puts on these professional airs and acts like a soulless robotic merchant, keep up, don't interrupt the business. When you have doubts, she makes fun of you. You say to her, "You don't even see these dreams. You don't know what they mean to me." To which she responds, "Don't give me that 'I can't sell the family farm!' shit." Nobody cares about what you have to do or what you're going through. It's just what you have to do to survive, you know. Yeah you'll lose something deeply and inexpressibly precious to you and you'll never get it back but too bad, that's just how life is. And the sacrifice you have to make goes completely unacknowledged. Good game.

Playtime: 15 minutes

This game is peak nostalgia value. I spent so many hours on Neopets when I was younger. I mean, I came after they freshened up the UI, so the art was better than the janky nightmare-inducing art "Ruffians" uses, but it still felt like a blast from the past. Love the dedication to recreating a Neopets-esque interface, brought me back to the good old days. Stair even submits to a Neopian Times expy at one point, and I read those stories dedicatedly as a kid.

In general, playing this game really reminded of middle school. It hearkens back to the 2010s Internet and the things middle schoolers get up to on the Internet in their free time (read: the things I got up to on the Internet in my free time as a middle schooler), i.e. cringey roleplaying. The writing captures the earnest cringe people make fun of middle schoolers for, but because it's so earnest, instead of cringing it's easy to get caught up in how dang excited the main characters are to have epik battles with their epik ninja punching powahz!!!! This is wholesome 100 poggers content.

The voice acting and sound effects add a lot to it, makes everything feel so much more real. Rachel's voice acting is great, and the sound of the (Spoiler - click to show)abusive mother banging on the door was horrifying. Also, the ending song is fantastic. Felt like the credits scene from a movie. And seeing the kids grow up, from being in elementary school to applying to colleges and getting in, was sweet in a coming-of-age way.

I give this game a 5/5 because despite some minor quibbles with the dialogue (should the characters' typing styles be exactly the same for ten years? Maybe the earlier ones should be less coherent and the later ones moreso?), it reminded me perfectly of the shenanigans I got up to as a kid, especially the Neopets part. Also it felt bittersweet seeing Stair and Bee since they reminded me of friends I used to have. I drifted away from all of them, mostly due to changing schools and falling out of touch—though, and this is pretty personal—someone I was close to, but not close enough, who had a bad family, killed herself after we graduated high school. Playing through the game, as Stair, I couldn't stop thinking about her. Even the way Stair typed reminded me of her, she was one of the few people I knew who always ended her chat messages with punctuation. Maybe this isn't the best place to mention it, but at the same time, I don't know, I had to put it out there.

I don't know. Sorry.

I feel like many people have forged Internet relationships like Bee and Stair's, but they usually don't last as long due to being long-distance and founded on anonymity. Though I'm biased since that's been my experience. But this is a great depiction of the platonic Internet relationship, one where neither party loses interest or drifts away from Neopets and stops talking to the other. It's just sweet and mutually uplifting throughout the ten years. I didn't pursue romance with Bee, but appreciated that even if Stair gently pushes back their romantic overtures they can still remain good friends.

Playtime: about an hour.