Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

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.

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.