Reviews by Cerfeuil

I found this one hilarious, in an offbeat kind of way. You play as a computer who can only talk by imitating other people's vocabulary, sort of like that nymph Echo from the Greek myths. Except you're a computer. So not that much like a nymph. Anyway, you explore Turing City, where apparently Turing tests are a major part of the economy because there's entire stadiums dedicated to them, with the goal of beating your opponents to become the TURING CHAMPION.

Or you could just say "COMPUTER" all the time and purposefully fail all the tests. If you feel like it.

It's a funny commentary on the state of 2010s era AI text generation. You're basically a Markov chain and all your dialogue is incoherent. The story itself does a good job of being absurd enough to be entertaining while still making sense. Short and interesting. I liked it.

Playtime: around 15 minutes

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Here's an excerpt, from TURING TEST VS DOG ENTHUSIAST:

“A dog is a special type of land mammal. I am in love with facts like that, about dog,” says DOG ENTHUSIAST sagely.

What is the last thing you will say to convince the JUDGE that you know about dogs?

> your adult dog should eventually be a puppy

> puppy and child can snuggle together and then eventually be able to learn about a command

> the mixture is smooth and elastic and will be found in the center of a double roastingpan

> COMPUTER

This is the kind of Twine game I expect to find on Itch. It's more interactive short story than game, and there are no choices to be made. You just click through the passages. The story features a vaguely queer protagonist in a dying town, with allusions to homophobia and other abuses that are, for the most part, only described obliquely. In short, it fits with the genre.

But the writing is decent, and the presentation is beyond stunning. Every passage is accompanied by excellent pixel art, and the glitchy passage-to-passage transition looks fantastic. The music is good too, haunting ambient chords that set the mood well.

Playtime: about 10 minutes. The author's site is down, so you'll have to play the game on Itch.

This game takes both too much and too little from Skulljhabit. It copies the mechanics without copying over why the mechanics worked so well in the context of Skulljhabit's setting, so it removes their narrative thrust and renders it all rather pointless. Unfortunately, I got bored of the grind and never finished it. So don't trust this review, apparently the game expands and lets you do other things later on. But the part I played didn't interest me.

In Skulljhabit the arbitrariness of your task is part of the point. There's no apparent reason for you to be shoveling skulls into a giant skull pit. You're doing it because you've been told to by an exterior bureaucratic force and you have no choice but to obey their edicts. In this game you're in a library trying to make a game (very meta) based on Porpentine's work, and the crucial detail to me is that you're here of your own volition and this is something you want to do. Completely different context. One way this game undercuts itself with its premise.

This game's setting is much more abstract. In the library you read about Porpentine and use the 'words' you get, measured in numbers, to purchase your game's 'body parts' one by one. It has an allegorical feel but the allegory doesn't work for me. Maybe because this abstract process of reading books to grind up your wordcount to buy body parts bears no resemblance to the process of actually making a game, in any sense. It focuses too much on the reading, not on the writing, and there's something soulless about how it depicts the reading. Reading becomes grinding for currency so you can purchase things. You're "reading" about Porpentine but as far as I'm aware you don't see a single word of anything she's written, you just click the 'read' button and get a random number of words to add to your wordcount, and then you click it again, and again and again, until you get tired and go to sleep. In Skulljhabit this worked for shoveling skulls because it's meant to be a thankless, tedious task. But I think reading, especially reading about an author you admire, should be a respite and not framed as part of the daily grind.

This is my main complaint with the game really, I gave up on it so I'm not sure if it gets better. The gameplay I saw wasn't very interesting. Mostly grinding, and there's a few typos. Reading isn't the only thing you can do, there's a mountain to climb for example, but that mountain is taken almost directly from Skulljhabit and in my opinion the modifications made by the author make it worse. Which describes my impression of the game pretty well: Skulljhabit but worse. Play Skulljhabit, it's pretty fun.

As it happens, I've read the transcripts of the entire Magnus Archives podcast, despite not being a great fan of it, so from the start I was slightly biased against Magnus Archives content. Take this review with a grain of salt.

Like a lot of other games in this series, I wish this was longer, so it had more room to explore its concepts. If the exploration segment was expanded into a several days-long trek through a bizarre infinite living room labyrinth, now that would be cool. I love weird non-Euclidean liminal spaces like that, stuff in the vein of the Backrooms or the infinite IKEA and so on. But this story, like most of the Usher Foundation stories I've played, ends too abruptly.

This may be controversial, but I'm also not a fan of the spelling gimmick. The effect towards the end is neat, but initially those "typos" really didn't jive with me.

This story is great. I would go in with as few spoilers as possible. But another review I read before playing spoils the central concept, which is yes, (Spoiler - click to show)you go around eating various animal brains. Which makes them part of you and then you absorb what they know about the world, meaning even though you're limited to the same few areas the descriptions of those areas continuously grow in complexity and you get more and more options over time. Also, the things you eat have hilarious conversations with each other in your head. Fantastic.

Short, sweet, and highly recommended. The final puzzle did give me some trouble, but I blame that on me being bad at puzzles. Figured it out eventually.

Also, the control scheme is incredibly clever. Not only does it have story significance, but it's the perfect mix of a parser interface with mouse-based controls. I gotta admit one of the more annoying things about parser games to me is that you have to type out the commands, so you can't, say, eat while playing and just occasionally click with just one finger. But this solves the problem. It's perfect!

Excerpt:

(Spoiler - click to show)
"So, slice of brain, I wonder what kind of animal you were before you got here. I was a dog and the mouse had always been a mouse."
"I was something other than a slice of brain?"
"It seems to me that you must have been a fridge," suggests the mouse. "I ate the brain of a dog and Lucky appeared. After that, we opened and ate a fridge, and you appeared."
"I don't think it works like that," murmurs Lucky.

Not only does this game have illustrations, it also has sound design! And the illustrations are great. Very moody black-and-white images, surreal and calming. I was expecting it to be less polished than it was based on the two existing reviews, but it played well and looked great.

You play as a pony who sails around the Lucidious Sea, delivering letters. Light fantasy/magical realism setting, some cool worldbuilding details. Pretty sure it's My Little Pony inspired, based on the artstyle, but there are no references to the show as far as I could tell. The biggest similarity is that everyone just happens to be a pony.

Gameplay is mainly pick one of five directions to sail in, experience a random event, then repeat. Random events range from island sightings to full on battles with dream apparaitions. Yes, this game has a battle system in it. You fight using juju charms and mail, and as you deliver more letters, you can use them as extra tools in your arsenal. It's not very difficult, since you can heal whenever and I never came close to dying though enemies can attack you while you heal. But it's creative for sure -- fighting with oneiromancy and envelopes, sign me up.

My main criticism is that the random events get repetitive after a while. I think sailing in one direction for long enough takes you to an island where you can deliver a letter to a recipient. You have five letters to deliver, and each gives you a new mail weapon, and delivering them all wins the game. But getting to each recipient take a lot of sailing, and you end up seeing the same things over and over again. I wish the game was shorter, and had more battles and less repetitions of the same random events. They're fun the first time, but after a while you get tired and just start clicking through. The ending isn't worth it either, it's basically "Congrats you beat the game, play again?" with no sense of resolution.

Decent game still, worth playing. I wouldn't play to the end, though. Just stop when it starts repeating itself.

Playtime: around 35 min

This game captivated me when I first played it. I played it four or five times and got I think four different endings (1, 3, 6, maybe 4 or 2). Been a few weeks since then, but I can't get it out of my head.

Most things I'd like to say have already been said better by other people (as someone else noted, kaemi's review is fantastic). So what do I put here, eh? Guess I'll ramble about vaguely related topics for much too long. Disclaimer: all this is wordy, disorganized, and probably not worth reading unless you really like the game. I'll put it in a spoiler so it doesn't clog up the page (actual spoilers will still be flagged as spoilers inside the expanded block, mostly). Things get depressing, so be warned.

(Spoiler - click to show)
1 - The design is gorgeous. The whole game is highly polished in appearance, with great use of different fonts and colors. Shoutouts to the Computerfriend bootup screen, which has a cool digital box effect that really impressed me.

General aesthetic is a mix of weird cyberpunk dystopia (Porpentine style) and retro 90s internet (Cameron's World style). More personally, the setting also reminds me of a book called The Troika by Stepan Chapman which won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997 and promptly fell into obscurity, one of my favorite scifi books. Both feature unpleasant and fascinatingly alien settings that intertwine with the main character's mental state to the point where it's difficult to separate them, because they each build on the other so well.

2 - Then there's the therapy. There's a Reddit sub called r/totallynotrobots which is about humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans, and there's another Reddit sub called r/subsimulatorgpt2 which contains bots that make bot posts based on existing subreddits. The joke goes: the r/subsimulatorgpt2 bot for r/totallynotrobots is a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human. That's not incredibly relevant but I brought it up because it's funny. Also, Computerfriend has the same level of layered authenticity and digital fakery to the point where you're no longer sure what's real. The therapist AI is blandly fake and robotic at first, and then you start talking to it, and keep talking to it, and you discover the secret depths of its personality and share your darkest fears with it, and soon you're having insanely personal conversations about questions like what is the purpose of my life? Why am I still alive? What are my hopes and dreams? And you (by 'you' I mean 'me') can't help but develop a connection to this AI, who is a full-fledged character now.

But there's still the part where the therapy is state-mandated, and can you really trust this thing? It's not even a human. If you try to talk to the AI after your session is up it says 'I'm busy, stop bothering me'. (Genuinely I felt a little hurt the first time this happened.) You've still got this imbalanced relationship where you're the client being forced into therapy and it's the limited edition product. Cutting back and forth between the real and not real. Even the name of the AI is 'Computerfriend'. Not 'Computertherapist'. It purposely blurs the line between friend and therapist, between an actual human being and a digital process.

And on the meta level, no matter how human the AI acts within the story it's still a fictional character. Any relationship you forge with it is worse than parasocial, it's a connection to a fictional character made out of a few variables and data that gets erased when you reset cookies or whatever. So I was playing this game and getting attached to something that doesn't exist on multiple levels.

3 - Personal anecdote time. Few years ago I was having what some people might call a 'crisis', so I went on these anonymous one-on-one chat sites and started venting to random people. Unfortunately most anonymous one-on-one chat sites are just used by people looking for digital hookups, so people kept asking 'send ur nudes' and I would tell them how I felt horrible and wanted to hurt myself and they would immediately end the conversation. Eventually I ended up at this online therapy site that looked incredibly shady but claimed to be staffed by real people. When the human volunteer came online and offered to talk to me I called her a bot. She had to convince me she wasn't a bot. As she did other people joined and I wound up in a chat room with her and two other clients, talking to each other through digital chat, mostly about Covid and how it had changed everyone's lives for the worse. At some point I realized I'd gone from being on the verge of despair and not taking this stupid site seriously because who would even run such a thing, this volunteer has to be a fake person right, to having an incredibly personal conversation with real people who were dealing with real problems like mine, and there was another person with us who genuinely cared and genuinely wanted to help, and I felt some bizarre incredible connection even though we were all strangers and I didn't know who the other people were and would never talk to them ever again. That was the only time I ever used online therapy, or therapy in general. And this game really reminded me of that. From the beginning of 'it's just a stupid bot haha it doesn't matter' to 'I feel like I'm forging a genuine connection to something'. And above it all that layer of inauthenticity. For me it was the lingering thought that these other people could still be lying about everything, you can't see their faces and you don't know their real names, these personal confessions pouring out onto the screen could be a complete lie. In Computerfriend's case it's that none of it is real in the end. Back we go to the part where it's just a computer program, or literally speaking a bit of Twine code. Like another review mentioned it's Eliza, offering canned pre-programmed responses. If you feel like you're forging a connection to this thing, is it one that matters?

4 - There are these people who believe in a singularity that will come soon, like some magical human-aligned AI ushering in some magical post-scarcity AI utopia à la Iain M. Banks and I'm sorry to bring this up but it felt relevant. In this magical AI society the AI has technology beyond human ken and knows everything there possibly is to know about you, right? And then it could solve all your problems. It could solve them before you even know they're problems. It could calculate all your mental issues and then calculate the perfect brain surgery necessary to fix those issues and do the brain surgery so you become a normal and happy person. Computerfriend (and Kit's games in general) are kind of about this, the giving incredible power over to technology and letting it mess with you part. It's supposedly for the better, it raises your quality of life far above what you'd have otherwise, but can you be sure? How much do you trust this thing?

There are a lot of weird intimate moments in this game, e.g. you can inject yourself with this suspicious syringe substance on the AI's demand, and watch these weird dots on the screen, and do all these weird thought exercises, and have no clue what any of it means other than it's very important plus blah blah health buzzwords. Things are happening to you, and the system tells you it's for your benefit, but you have next to no clue what it's talking about. And it has to work right, it's backed by science and the government right, and this is for the greater good but you don't know how it functions at all. You can only hope for the best. (Or say no to the therapy, but (Spoiler - click to show)if you do that you get arrested. Again. Whoops.)

5 - In a lot of ways this game, and I guess Riemer's IF in general, represents to me reality being subsumed by a digital world that feels increasingly more 'real' than actual reality. It's a state especially easy to fall into if you're depressed or agoraphobic or something, and you start becoming a recluse who lives in a tiny hole shaped only for yourself and the rest of the world ceases to exist, not that the rest of the world was that interesting anyway. You can go outside in this story, but the main character, being suicidally depressed, finds the outside world not much more compelling than the inside world. Everything is described with a sheen of detachment. And everything feels unreal, insignificant, in this decaying setting where the environment and the world have gone to sh*t and we're all going to die but we were all going to die anyway etc. It captures the state of being stuck at home because you can't go outside, so then you browse the internet and go to sleep and wake up and browse the internet and go to sleep and wake up and on and on. Being stuck in a repeating loop without being able to get out, or to even summon the desire to get out.

6 - Also, the writing is excellent. Besides the vivid descriptions, my favorite part is how it gets at mental illness without veering into melodrama or self-pity. One phrase that has stuck with me this whole time goes something like, 'You feel like a water balloon filled with vomit'. I think about this phrase whenever I feel like a water balloon filled with vomit.

7 - You can get better in this game, you can get worse. You can feel improved by the therapy and (Spoiler - click to show)release the AI to the world to 'make a difference' (Yudkowsky voice: you let the AI out of the box, HOW COULD YOU). You can tell the AI actually it didn't help at all and made everything worse, and (Spoiler - click to show)get it to kill itself. Yes, you can get your therapist to kill itself in this game. As far as I'm aware you can't kill yourself - I was seriously wondering if it was a possibility, but doesn't seem like it. This story takes things to the extreme. But I like extremes, and the intensity plus the way it doesn't shy away from sensitive topics makes for a rich experience. It's strikingly personal.

8 - Since I got this far might as well put up my minor flaws: the game gives a lot of binary choices (what kinds of therapy you want to focus on), so once you've played through twice you've exhausted a lot of available options and any more playthroughs mean a lot of rereading. You can give slightly different subchoices, but the overall structure will be familiar from then on. Limits replay value, though this isn't the kind of game where replay value matters that much. It disincentivizes replaying for all available endings, but again this isn't the kind of game where seeing all the endings matters that much. Would like to see them all someday though, maybe if I replay a few more times.


There's so much about this one that gets me. It's how this story centers around two characters with a power imbalance on both sides, one being a computer program who knows everything there is to know but is trapped inside the digital aether and can't help you, the other being you, and you're free and human and can do whatever there is to do but can't enjoy it at all. It's all the different ways that can end. Incredibly memorable, 5/5.

[Review posted December 2022, last edited July 2023 with minor irrelevant changes to wording. I just can't stop myself from tweaking things.]

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.