Reviews by Cerfeuil

In which you're a generic office worker with a bit of a problem. Love the escalation in this one, it starts off maybe realistic then keeps ramping up and up. The beginning is slow, a little boring in my opinion, but when the visual effects kick in that's when the real fun starts. Wish things would go downhill faster and farther, actually. What if you could burn down the company office? What if you could kill your boss?

The writing is a tad too "woe is me" for my tastes, but that's personal preference. I do feel sorry for the protagonist.

Have to mention the last line as well. That last line is gold. It really makes the story for me. (Spoiler - click to show)The idea that everyone else is dealing with this and there's absolutely no reason for you to worry about it, but you hate it anyway, resonates with me on a personal level. I wish it had been foreshadowed more, since on replay it seems more like a 'comes out of nowhere' twist, but I love it anyway. The concept of an otherwise-ordinary world where everyone is just bleeding out of their noses all the time is excellently surreal as well. End note!

So I didn't manage to beat this game within the 2-hour mark (spent too long trying to access the janitorbot's security logs before I gave up and looked at the walkthrough). Very fun game. Nothing super unique about the setting, but the whole 'you're trapped in an abandoned ship with one questionably helpful character who may or may not be a mass murderer' is a great concept. Also, Portal reference. Also you can make friends with the rogue AI! what! I am a sucker for AI and character interaction so this was good. The puzzles are well-balanced, no stupid guessing involved, but talking to the AI is the real draw of this game and it delivers. Love how every new thing you discover tells you more and more about what actually happened, until you finally figure out the dark truth. I guessed that (Spoiler - click to show)the AI was responsible for the deaths early on, though. After seeing Trell's logs it becomes rather obvious that Solis has gone rogue, though I didn't know why until the reveal about the technician.

Beat the game after 2.5 hours. Detail on endings: (Spoiler - click to show)got the fifth ending (because of course), friendship acquired. Went back for the fourth ending but didn't feel like getting any of the others because I like Solis and don't want anything bad to happen to them. Good game.

Fun little game. You play as a witch trying to escape a mental prison. Well, you actually play as her familiar (?), who apparently lives inside her head? Like a lot of other things about the plot, it's never fully explained. But I liked seeing the two characters work together, and there's a nice sense of playful camaraderie going on. No matter what choices you make, it's clear that you're great partners who've been together for a long while. Wish it was explored more.

There are cool scenes inside the mind prison—you can do fortune telling! Brew potions! Feed a cat! But ultimately the game isn't very complex, and there are too many interesting details that are thrown out there and then not really addressed. A few grammatical errors too, but they didn't detract heavily from the experience.

Also, my minor gripe is the potion game takes too long to show you which ingredients you have. Would have replayed, but didn't have the patience to prepare all the ingredients again.

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."

Played this one a while ago and can't stop thinking about it. Didn't expect much from the description, but the start is immediately engaging with its wonderful design, both in sound and appearance, and the 'you wake up amnesiac' plot hook (an oldie but goodie). Then the moment you think you've found your footing, it pulls you out into the Lovecraft Inn, and then.... I'll admit the system of switching between fiction and reality is a little jank, and there are some quirks of the game's behavior that I'm not sure are intentional. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)you can sell the suitcase, then ride the ferris wheel to get it back. (I also don't know what the suitcase was supposed to do, think I sold it then left the story so I couldn't get on the ferris wheel again. Whoops.) Is that a glitch? The game never tells you how everything is supposed to work—it would ruin the fun, after all—so I have no idea.

But generally speaking: As I learned to play the system, switching between hotel and story to shift things on both ends, I got more and more into it. So many satisfying parallels between fiction and reality, and the weird details thrown in there are excellently creepy. Especially the carnival. Sh*t gets wack, yo. And the ending is excellent.

Great sense of place, uncanny aesthetic (as befitting the name!), clever writing and puzzles. Didn't even notice the Dante's Inferno allusions until I saw one of the other reviews pointing it out.

A classic 'explore mysteriously abandoned spaceship' game: solve puzzles and figure out what happened to the crew. Rather simple story, featuring the generically named CORPORATION UNLIMITED as driving force for the plot. The AI was the most interesting character, but we barely get to see him. (I am biased towards AI characters, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Puzzles were well-balanced if a bit obvious, with hints galore telling you what you need to do. Didn't have trouble with any, thought the logic/math puzzles at the end were tedious. Not generally fond of puzzles you can solve by feeding into a computer. But the writing has a nice humorous touch and decent atmosphere, despite the rare typo. I liked the wacky corporate ship names, Silver Lining and Charitable Donation, and I bet there are other ships with names like Synergy or Paradigm Shift. 4/5 for presentation and because I'm fond of abandoned spaceships.

Playtime: about 50 minutes. Ended with (Spoiler - click to show)'Humanitarian' after 7 loops, where you bring the crew back and save the ship, because I refuse to trust that shady corporate AI. Discovered 2/3 dumb (and funny) ways to die. I'm satisfied with my ending, so doubt I'll play again.

Favorite quote:

> > 3. About CORPORATION UNLIMITED
>
> CORPORATION UNLIMITED was founded in the year 2072 by [redacted]
>
> It [redacted]
>
> Despite the [redacted]
>
> DOC reads the screen behind you.
>
> "Interesting! Several years ago CORPORATION UNLIMITED made their GREAT TRANSPARENCY PROMISE. I'm sure it'll take effect any day now."

(Let me guess: that transparency is never gonna happen.)

I love Chandler Groover's stories, and this one is no exception. It's minimalist but makes great use of what detail exists. Each location is vividly sketched out in a few sentences, hinting at an expansive wider setting. Loved the aesthetic as well. As usual, descriptions are lush and food is involved in a mildly horrifying way.

The puzzles are unique and charming. Last puzzle did give me some trouble, seems like I'm not the only one. Apparently (Spoiler - click to show)the merry droll-teller gives you a hint for the items you need, but I'd frozen him and couldn't remember the route to get him back. Ended up tracing the right path without collecting any items, so I had to look up the hint for solving that one.

Distinctive and playful aesthetic, charming puzzles, great ASCII art.