Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

Your daring foray into the abandoned industrial sector near downtown was just an experiment to see if you could catch sight of one of the new cryptids that had invaded your world just a few years past. Only a glimpse, and new respect (and possibly riches) would be yours!

A bit underimplemented, as all parser SpeedIF tends to be, but charming in its own right. That last message is chilling. I'd like to complain about the stove and sink being a red herring, since I spent a while flicking them on and off fruitlessly while wondering if I was supposed to set things on fire or put them out. I did figure it out eventually, though.

Hm... on second thought, I do wonder if the (Spoiler - click to show)flashlight was real at all, or some kind of hallucination? It seemed real enough while I had it, but, well.

Anyway, haunted house stories are a favorite of mine. I liked this one. The atmosphere is great and the abandoned house is well-described. I've never been one for exploring abandoned buildings, but this game makes me want to do that (ideally without the fate that befalls this main character in particular!). A good game for rainy autumn afternoons.

Walkthrough in case someone needs it: (Spoiler - click to show)Go all the way up to the attic, turn on the fusebox, and touch the wires. Then take the flashlight to the east and try to leave the house.

A man's son starts calling him by a different name; soon he finds everyone calling him by that name, and begins to question his identity. Unsettling and presents no clear answers as to why this is happening or what the root cause is. Several possible theories: is this another entity named Yarry, pulling strings? Trying to replace him? Or is he just paranoid and a bad father? The lack of clarity on the true cause makes it great.

Thoughts on endings:

(Spoiler - click to show)The ending where you reject the name is enigmatic and ambiguous. The threat still exists, but it's so ill-defined that you don't know how to fight it. Is fighting it even possible?

The ending where you accept the name took the wind out of my sails a bit. This might just be me, but I wanted a more dramatic replacement scene, where the main character ends up an unwanted stranger in his own family's home. Or something like that. That's just personal opinion though.

A short, creepy game with a conversational interface of the kind I rarely see in Inform, much less 4-hour speed games, so that deserves praise on its own. The principal antagonist is great. Love it.

Thoughts on the story:

(Spoiler - click to show)I thought of parasites from the opening line, probably because my own Ectocomp entry was about parasites. On reading farther it seems to be a bodysnatcher situation specifically, where the entity eventually replaces you entirely. Based on those lines about "the scent of your heart" and "the sound of your blood moving", it starts off growing somewhere inside your body and eventually replaces you. Maybe it hijacks your muscles, leading to with a puppetry situation where it's controlling you while you're paralyzed inside your own body. Or maybe it grows into the tender fatty cells of your cerebellum and kills off your consciousness, so you never see yourself become a living corpse. I mean, we've got options here. Wonder which would be worse. On the one hand you might end up completely trapped, watching from within as something that isn't you commandeers your body for the rest of your life... on the other hand, if that's the case you'd at least still be alive. Maybe you could even try to negotiate. Maybe I'm making stuff up. Anyone remember Aftran from Animorphs?

I'm a fan of this one because I'm biased towards parasites. You can hardly get more intimate or deadly than having a "something" living inside you, squirming around in your guts, knotting up your neurons... Didn't someone say love is also a parasitism? Growing in your brain, a disease with a possibly-unwilling carrier? Am I making stuff up again? The parasite in this case resembles an abusive or jilted lover, demanding more than you can give, resenting that you can't give it all, always wanting more. An all-consuming love interlaced with a love of consumption. Devouring someone from the inside out.

You don't want that to happen to you. Obviously.

Funny game. You invite a fey/demon/eldritch abomination over to your house to make a deal with it, and as you can expect, there are a number of ways the deal can end badly for you. I've seen a lot of stories with this exact concept, yet somehow it never gets old. The variety of ways you can get screwed over by tiny differences in wording are thououghly entertaining (though maybe not for our poor sop of a protagonist). I failed the first time because (Spoiler - click to show)I made the mistake of telling it that the winning lottery numbers were "all I wanted", and then it got me when I exchanged them for the prize money, because of course I didn't just want the numbers. I succeeded in not ruining my life the second time, but had a lot of fun going through the other paths to see how many bad ends there were. Answer: a lot. There's a level of black humor/schadenfreude involved in trying to rack up all the fates worse than death you can.

I do think the long wait on the ending screen could be slowed down a bit, or maybe replaced with an immediate link to the main menu, because I was sitting there for a while trying to figure out what to do.

I was recommended this game because it has parasites in it. I love parasites. Now, the implementation is a bit finicky because it's a SpeedIF, and I got stuck early on and had to use David Welbourn's walkthrough. (Where would we be without him?) Similarly, there's a few grammatical/spelling errors floating around. But the main draw of !parasites! is still there.

She has become thin this past weeks, as the parasites ate her brain. Her skin is shimmering light blue, and sometimes you can see hints of their movements under her skin. You barely see the woman whose touch once made you shudder, whom you held and whose breathing you learnt to listen to when you couldn't sleep. Monsters are eating her, and she has become one herself.

Don't remember how I got this in my bookmarks. Maybe Twitter. Anyway, this can barely be called a game, since it's unfinished. There's only two things you can really interact with, and one NPC, the door, who doesn't even have all its dialogue written out. Some of it is just "DIALOG".

Why bother rating it and putting it on IFDB, then? Because this has one of the most spectacular interfaces of any Twine game I've ever played. Period. The person who made it is a professional web designer, and it shows. This is a three-dimensional escape room, IN TWINE, where you can choose which direction you face at any given moment (north/south/east/west) and the room will rotate as you face that direction. I imagine it's all done with CSS effects behind the scenes, and the end result is unbelievably cool. The flashing GIFs are cool too. Shame there's no substance to it. Not even an ending. You tell the door you'll fight it if it doesn't let you out of the room, and you get an unfinished COMBAT prompt, and that's all there is.

Fine, I lied, there's also a dev page that lets you access unfinished parts of other locations. Some interesting ideas there, but nothing much. Most of the paths kick you out to a placeholder featureless room.

In its current state, the game is just a tech demo. It seems like the creator lost motivation to work on it, which is why it was published in this state. Unfortunate.

This game had a cult following at some point, which is how I heard about it. Nowadays the subreddit is pretty dead. I blame this on the game, which is really a website with hundreds of pages to explore, being difficult to parse and therefore inaccessible to newcomers.

The website has an odd and intentionally cryptic storyline, where you are a Probe exploring Terminal 00, part of a network of Terminals whose goal is to "Open the Gate". This goal is stymied by attacks from something called the CoS. If that doesn't make much sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to me, either. There are several pages that explain the lore farther, most of which can be accessed from the Assistance page, but don't expect clarity.

I think surreal and cryptic storylines definitely can work under certain circumstances, but the writing here just isn't very good, and there's too much nonsense being thrown around for me to really understand any part of it. Combine this with the fact that some webpages are locked behind cryptographic puzzles and I really don't know what's going on. Not only that, but I'm not motivated to find out what's going on. I'd explore a bit, dig deeper if it interests you, and leave if it doesn't.

Why three stars despite this? Because the website looks mind-bogglingly cool. Awesome glitchy aesthetic and a lot of unique visuals. Also music. Downside is that the music and visuals take a while to load, but they're worth looking at for a few minutes.

I voted playtime to be half an hour, but it depends on how much time you're willing to spend on this. I can see someone using hours of their life to decode the messages. I can also see someone looking around, getting bored, and leaving within a few minutes. It depends. I personally can't imagine spending too much time here, though.

When the world ended, life became an unpleasant costume. You have only ever wanted to gift it to something else, but it is not so easy now.

Instead you lie here, reduced to nothing.

THE SHADOW UNDER THE LONG BRIDGE: A small cove rests in the shadow of the bridge. Discarded things gather here.

A weeping beast crouches on the edge of the rocks with what limbs he has to spare.

> CLOSE YOUR EYES

Faint chatter, steps, wheels. The bridge remembers those who came before. Their imprints echo quietly from above.

Wind unhindered by life.

It cuts your hands more kindly than any blade.

The little creature approaches the water’s edge. The tide ebbs and flows, the shallower parts of the ocean lack its signature opaque darkness. Instead filled with a quiet radiance.

> WALK INTO THE WATER

It’s cold. If you were an older thing it would hunger for you, but alas. You are not ready yet.

Here's another game I found online at random and thought would be a good fit for this site. It takes the form of a timeline, where you can click a specific event to change its outcome, and by doing so change the course of world history. You only have a few events that can be changed to start with, but things butterfly pretty fast.

It's interesting to click around and see the alternate futures you can come up with, but the game has several major issues. The biggest is that it needs some way to make certain events incompatible with each other, so you don't get something like "1930: Sealand takes over the entire world. All other countries become colonies of Sealand. 1947: The Cold War begins between the US and USSR." I also really wish you could change events that are themselves the results of other changed events. That would lead to more in-depth and interesting gameplay.

It's still kind of fun to see how much you can change, though.