Reviews by Cerfeuil

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.

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.

[Review originally written October 2024, tag added in November 2024]

I stumbled on this game online and figured it should get an IFDB page. It's a simulation of what it's like to get a PhD, made by someone who actually has gotten a PhD in electrical engineering. Got reposted across social media a few times, which is how I found it.

Gameplay is vaguely Choicescript-esque. At any juncture, you have several options to choose from and can pick one. Doing so advances time by a month, and may cause a random event to happen. Your main stat is "Hope", which you have to prevent from falling to 0, since doing so instantly ends the game. There's not a whole lot of variety after your first few years, but managing resources and trying to balance the work-life grind is pretty fun.

I found it difficult and couldn't win after three tries. That might just be realistic. While I've never gotten close to attempting a PhD (thankfully), comments from the actual PhD students who've played the game made it seem pretty true to life.

I estimate the average run is in the ballpark of 10-20 minutes. It's not easy, but this fourth attempt has to be the one, right?

Edit: On my fourth attempt, I finally managed to obtain a PhD from PhD University with 3 papers under my belt (and no conference papers, those are a killer). It only took me 6 years and 5 months. Could be worse?

[Written August 2024 with minor edits November 2024.]

A strange game. I'd call it a mostly linear hypertext novel, short by novel standards but long by IF standards. Very ambitious, covering a wide range of perspectives and characters, and jumping between them with aplomb. You can make choices, but they don't seem to have much staying power, partly due to how the story's told.

The game has three acts, and each act retells one series of events. So you get more or less the same series of events, three times. I say "series of events" because it's several intertwining plotlines, involving several different characters who all do different things and eventually converge in a church during a possible apocalypse. I say "more or less" because there are variations in what happens, and whose perspectives we get, but the characters involved always stay the same.

Beyond that, I had a hard time discerning the specifics of the overall situation. There are certain lines, like stuff August says, that makes me think a literal time loop might be involved. Maybe these events are recurring over and over in an endless cycle, with only certain characters aware of it. If so, the ending seems to indicate a release of some kind from the eternal recurrence, with (Spoiler - click to show)the torrential, world-ending rain becoming a blizzard, and the characters sheltering in the church that got destroyed in the other two loops.

I liked the events and scenarios presented. The one about the cult of kids who live in an abandoned factory and listen to the voices of pigs was particularly striking to me. There's some compelling imagery in this story, both in specific lines like the ones I point out below, and the general aesthetics of certain scenes. Like when Nana points out the rain of blood to the bartender, and he momentarily looks up and sees it. I did, however, wish there was more meat to the worldbuilding. What is causing this apocalypse/cycle business? What kind of stuff is happening in the world where a bunch of children can just abandon their families and join a cult for rotting pig bodies that actually speak to them? The story takes place on Earth, or some version of it, but didn't really feel like it was rooted in any Earth I know.

The main barrier for me, though, was the surrealism and rapid perspective switching. It's done well in some cases and badly in others. There are occasions where it's used in ways I enjoyed, e.g. the transitions between perspectives in the first part are smooth and pretty clever. But once you get to the third part, there are so many perspectives flying out at you that I had only the vaguest idea of what was happening. Because of that, it was hard for me to really connect to any of the characters or the story overall.

I think this story would benefit a lot from more editing. A beta reader, at least. There are more than a few typos and grammatical errors. More editing might also improve the overall difficulty of understanding certain scenes. My least favorite parts were the prologues to each act and the ending. In the prologues, I could never really tell who was talking or why. It just felt like vaguely philosophical dialogue that didn't have anything to do with the story. In Act 3 and the ending, the tendency towards ambiguous perspective switching and surrealism was at its worst. Sure, there were a few moments in the ending where I did get what was going on, and could follow the perspective as it jumped from character to character, and those moments was amazing. But there were also sections where I ended up skimming because I couldn't figure it out.

That said, the writing has some really cool parts. Samples:

(I couldn't copy-paste these directly, so I typed them out by hand. Sorry for any errors.)

"Time being pulled apart, frayed, sewn together again backwards under the luminescent blinking of the ceiling lights."

"August's body floated downstream to some other part of town, or maybe to some other town entirely. Maybe towards a beach in a dry place where it never rained. Where sand drifted between cliffs along the horizon. Where everything was always warm."

"Trees that extend far up into the clouds, left to grow for centuries, their shadows so long they cross state lines on a sunny day."

Also, the full-color backgrounds were all drawn by the author and look amazing. (Fine, one specific background, the fiery one in the ending of Act 2, clashed with the text and made it hard to read. Maybe a partially-transparent black box beneath the text would help with that? But besides that, they're great and it's impressive that they were hand-made.) The backgrounds are combined with sound effects for each passage, and really contribute to immersion. Stuff like this feels highly cinematic, bringing IF a few steps closer to a full-color film, and I'm all here for it.

Playtime: ~80 minutes

This game is vaguely reminiscent of two other games I've played recently, Pageant and PhD Simulator. All three are simulation games with a central focus on grinding through, yep, school. Grad school in the case of PhD Simulator, high school in the case of Pageant and this game. PhD Simulator and this game are both made in custom engines and both very light on writing and story, letting narratives develop naturally through the player's gameplay. Pageant, on the other hand, has an actual storyline about a high schooler named Karen Zhao who applies to a beauty pageant for the sake of college apps. But there are still stats for the beauty pageant and specific requirements that must be met to win, and like in this game, Karen needs to get into a good college. For the sake of your future, they say. It will be worth it, they say.

What's the commonality between these games? They all use resource management mechanics to capture the soulless grind of the American university system and how far people need to go to "make it". PhD Simulator and this game both have a sanity-type mechanic, where your hope lessens day after day as you do nothing but work and study and work, no time for hobbies when you need to meet the metrics or you'll fall behind. Pageant has no sanity stat, only a time stat, but Karen does pass out in the middle of school due to lack of sleep. One of the things you can do when waking up in the nurse's office is say you're fine and go back to class. Can't miss the important content, after all. Look, all these other people have gotten their PhDs already. All these other people will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them.

In Pageant, the main goal is winning the beauty pageant and not getting into Yale, but that beauty pageant is indirectly about getting into Yale. You're not allowed to do something for its own sake, just to have fun. If you do, it's time you're wasting and should be channeling towards a greater end.

("But the college application system rewards genuinely passionate people, not just soulless automatons who do what they're supposed to do because they can't imagine anything else!" Colleges can't tell genuine passion from a person who's faking it, and the highly regimented specific hoops a person needs to jump through to "demonstrate passion" are easy to fake, so now everyone needs to fake them. You know that saying about how a measure stops being a good measure once people start using it as a target? For every happy passionate person who makes it into the good college as intended, there are at least ten terrified kids trained into anxious self-hating hyperperfectionists because the surrounding culture has convinced them that HYPSMC hyperperfectionism is the only way to win. Success in the "good colleges" guarantees money and a stable job for the rest of your life and a chance at huge power, wealth or fame. Who wouldn't want that? Of course, those kids might not even get in.)

From a post on r/ApplyingToCollege, the subreddit where this game was posted. This post has 2000+ upvotes:

As I write down the activities and awards that describe me, I feel no passion nor excitement over them. Orchestra? Forced to pick an instrument in middle school. Model United Nations? ao's love that, right? Community Service? I couldn't give a single shit about this toxic ass community of selfish humans that doesn't bat an eye what happens to me. I'm not a bright, optimistic person that my activities show. I'm not even the person I say I am in my personal essay that I spent countless hours toiling with my blood, sweat and tears over, which is a cycle im sure will repeat multiple times. Are you kidding me? I'm 18 years old. You want me to write about who I am? I don't even know who I am...

There is this feeling I never felt before. Whenever I feel happy, whenever I ace a test or do something that brings my mood up, I feel a certain dread approach me. It's telling me that I shouldn't be relaxing, or playing games, or reading light novels, or watching anime, and it's telling me that I'm not allowed to feel happy. Don't forget to edit your personal statement! Did you finish your college list yet? Which topics are you writing for the UC essays again? Which college in this university are you applying for? Are you sure you want to apply to this school? What makes this school different than this? Are you going to retake that good sat score because you screwed up the essay? Are you going to miss registration deadlines like last time?

Your life has looked almost exactly the same for every day of the past however-many months. You wake up, do the bare minimum to keep yourself presentable, and then usually sit at your computer half-watching a man hundreds of miles away from you draw on his computer. Presumably these drawings are important. Sometimes, you even write down the words he says; this is generally considered to be a good use of your time.

You’ve found it hard to believe you’re a person, lately. You have a vague idea that people are supposed to go outside, see their friends, take walks in parks, et cetera. Instead you just sit at home, and go through the motions of study. Stagnating.

[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

The pale desert of this moon curves towards an empty horizon.

...

Clouds of gray dust swirl in your wake.

The wind is howling a language that you do not understand.

...

Moonlight is shining through the stained glass window, painting a rose of rainbows on the floor.

She is still waiting.

Middle school bodies are like crappy NYC apartments: nothing seems to fit right, the smells never go away, and the general experience makes you wonder how growing up was ever considered a good idea.

Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don't get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)

You’ve been instructed to write a short essay on the topic “Should kids have homework?” for English class. While you are glad your teacher is interested in hearing about topics actually relevant to your life (unlike last week’s discussion climate change), you’re not quite sure where to start.

You reach down in the deep well of ideas swirling inside your brain. Homework good… but also bad?

You look where the sky should be only to see a river. You reach for the current. It's warm.

I’m going to sink. I always knew that, but I thought my boat would hold water. None of you know what it’s like to plant a seed by hand. You fix weights to ships, and you tell them the water's fine.

I’m an arduous process, arboreous labor. My bones are the dirt the ground came from, my trees the gift of broken hands. I want you to find the coastline. But none of you see it, none of you do.

It is empty. The world around you is creaks and bones, the hardwood floor a muted fretboard. No one else is around. The universe is quiet, a silent denouement for an inevitable ending. You see it on the skin, the distance. Your time is drawing to a close.

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.

So you're this hapless guy, Tiel, who learns his partner Heron is breaking up with him. Luckily, he has what every jilted boyfriend wants: a pocket time machine! So he rewinds and tries again. And again. And again...

(Spoiler - click to show)From the first loop on, it's pretty clear that Tiel is a bit of a creep. This gets worse in one of the paths you can take, where you learn that he only got with Heron because of the time machine, which let him try to seduce Heron again and again until ey reacted the way he wanted em to. Not exactly the foundation for an equitable relationship. Here, the situation is similar to that first meeting: you can keep trying again and again until you hit upon the right combination of words and actions that will get Heron to stay with him. Or you can actually make Tiel throw up his hands and give up, acknowledging that he's being a manipulative bastard, and destroy the time machine.

That option is clearly the most moral one, but from Heron's perspective it's interesting, because none of that ever really happened, did it? Heron doesn't remember anything you do to em before a reset. So from Heron's perspective, the ending where Tiel convinces em to stay is just - "dang, my boyfriend suddenly turned a new leaf the day I was thinking about breaking up with him, maybe this can work after all".

And Tiel thinks it can, but personally I don't think it will. There are some pretty dark implications that come with turning back time to get a better result for yourself in a relationship. If Tiel does something awful to Heron in the future, can he just turn back time and be like "aw gee shucks that didn't happen" and get away with it scot-free? (I read a story a while ago that involved an abuser who could manipulate memories, so he could do anything to his boyfriend, make him forget about it afterwards, and pretend they lived a happy life together. It didn't end well.)

Part of me wishes the story leaned more into the implications, but Ending 1 is fine as it is, too. Tiel still thinks of himself as a good person, and resolves not to hurt Heron despite the fact that he's still the one with the time machine and the desire to manipulate people by using it. Not a great combo.

Anyway, fun story, and easier to understand than Primer.

Playtime: ~10 min

I played this game a while ago and figured I might as well write something for the review-a-thon event. For me it's hard to really rate and review most Neo Twiny games, since they have a 500 word limit, so usually you can't say too much on the game itself without going into tangents and eventually rambling on for paragraphs about nothing relevant in particular. I might do some of that.

I liked this game. Somewhere the author said they liked Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, a book I also really like, and I found myself thinking about Annihilation while playing. Mostly for the flavor of eldritch horror. In Annihilation, a team of scientists travel into a wilderness overtaken by an eldritch force, lush with strange and winderful lifeforms; here, the entity that accosts the protagonist's spacecraft is described as "beautiful and terrible and surreal". The key is that in both stories, the horror isn't horrific at all but more something unknown, difficult to understand, totally outside the landscape of human knowledge. To understand it would be to cease being human. That kind of deal.

But there seems to be no actual malice on the entity's part. It doesn't rip people apart or anything. Of the deaths it causes in this story, two are from suicide and two are from crew members fighting over whether they should let it in. (Spoiler - click to show)This is actually what you do in one of the game's three endings: you open the door to let that thing in, whatever it is, and the story ends with the understanding that the protagonist will never see Earth again.

There are two other endings, but that last one is my favorite. I guess it's a flavor of story I like. It's the whole leap of faith thing, accepting the unknown. To me, the story is about acceptance. The beauty of reaching out to the thing that's destroyed you, because you need to understand. Alien connection. Humanity's ultimate insignificance in the universe. Ascension in a way that involves losing everything, but you do it because you're compelled to make contact with a higher form of existence. Or something like that. I could go on.

I don't know how much of that is implicit in the game and how much is just me reading stuff I like into what's a pretty short story, all things considered. In Annihilation, people don't really die. They're transformed. It could be the same here, too, or maybe the ending where you let it in just ends with an unceremonious death for the protagonist as she's instantly killed. Hard to say. But anyway, cool stuff.

I also have to mention the great CSS. Minimalistic but hits all the right notes.

Playtime: ~5 min

It's been a while since I played; this review is based on an unfinished one I wrote back during Ectocomp when I'd just played the game. I was really fond, and I'm still amazed the authors managed to make it in four hours. There's a lot going on here. Granted, I've never used Inform so I don't know how easy these tricks were to pull off, but from the complexity of some, I wanna say "not easy at all".

It's a solid game. There's a map system and a trap system and adventurers who navigate your map/trap system who you must stymie, lest they steal your precious magical artifact! The rooms are are all charming and inventive (and even more excellent with the ALLTEXT option!). The central puzzle itself was really neat. It took me four tries to figure out, but was highly satisfying to solve.

The concept, where you're a monster who has to stop those pesky adventurers from raiding your home instead of the other way around, is also a good twist on your typical dungeon fantasy plot. As far as parser games go, this is a really unique one. I also love that detail where the strange letter spellings are actually based on standards for writing out ancient Mesopotamian or something like that. The most alien things are actually just relics of a distant human civilization. Pretty cool.

Playtime: ~30 min

I know there's a lot of grad school lit theory about the significance of words and images and signifiers and stuff, but I have no direct experience with that so I can only vaguely gesture at it from afar. Sad. But it's the first thing I thought of with this game.

The concept is pretty unique: it's a Twine game made by a sentient word that's taken over your body, written to you, the player. And word means word, as in a series of letters (or strokes, characters, etc? but this is in English so I'm assuming letters) representing an idea. We never find out what idea or what word the narrator actually is, so there's a layer of abstraction there. You could say the narrator is more the concept of a word than an actual word, I mean, obviously real words can't write Twine games and take over people's bodies and so on. But that's basic suspension of disbelief, so anyway.

A lot of the story is musing on meaning and the difference between words and images, the significance of both in interactive fiction, and stuff like that. There's some fun references to typography ("...I felt like serifs were coming out of me -- it's sweat. Sweating is a terrifying experience"), and emphasis placed on how limited and inadequate words are for communication, compared to actually living life and experiencing things directly. The word suffers from a bit of sensory overload over all the possibilities available to a human body and wonders how writers can just gloss over details like the glow of a lightbulb ("I can't believe writers don't talk about these magical devices forever"). Which is ironic, of course, because the game itself is entirely text with no images or extra stylings or anything of the sort. It was made for the Bare-Bones Jam, where the lack of extra formatting was a requirement. Pretty good use of the limitation, I think.

The in-story explanation for why the styling is so bare-bones is that the word didn't have time to learn about styling Twine. There's some nice details that come from the word being very honest about its newbie status, like the desk passage it just forgot to write about: "Oh shoot, I was so busy writing the game that I forgot to set up this node until I started to test it..." or the remark about how it'd be nicer if the Harlowe documentation was easier to read. The word's personality comes through pretty strong in this story, despite its relatively short wordcount. Our narrator is humble, awed at the richness of human existence, and endearing in an "aw shucks" way. I liked it.

The word expresses a strong belief in the superiority of images over text, and says an ideal world would contain no text, only images. Even the law would be expressed in images only. It's clearly a comedic kind of opinion you're meant to disagree with, and there's an especially funny part where the word discovers something called the "Top 50 Interactive Fiction" list and gets ticked off that all these games have so many words in them. "Unbelievable!"

But in the end there's still an acknowledgement that words are communiciation, and like any form of communication they can reach someone and affect them deeply. Sure, there are things you can do with images and multimedia that words could never manage, but the converse is also true. It's why we're here.

Some other stuff:

1 - The "you" in the story, i.e. the human whose body gets taken over, isn't a generic AFGNCAAP protagonist but a specific person with their own hobbies and so on. The bookshelf specifically made me wonder if the human is based on the author specifically, since it has the kind of books I feel like they'd own. You can look through each one and get commentary: there's manga, an international relations textbook, and also Pale Fire is in there. Which is really funny. Like finding a metafictional cherry hidden in your metafictional cake.

2 - I appreciate that we get to try out dozens of clothes articles from the dresser. Each one has detailed descriptions of how the word reacts, too. Pretty fun.

I would probably have more to say on this matter if I'd read all that stuff about signifiers. Unfortunately, I haven't.

Playtime: ~10 min

A bizarre and beautiful game. As given by the description, you are in purgatory after having apparently... died? But the nature of your death, or even your life, doesn't matter much. It's not that kind of story. Instead of learning about who you were and what you've left behind or that stuff you often see in those "I died and now must come to terms with my existence" stories, you're just wandering around a strange bird park and having strange encounters with strange people. At the end of it all, you... transcend? It's not entirely clear.

This one Youtuber made a video about how game journalists will describe every single game as a combination of some other game, and I think about that every time I tell myself "this thing is just like that thing plus that other thing", but I'll do it here anyway. Provizora Parko is a bit like You are Standing at a Crossroads meets Beautiful Dreamer. Like You Are Standing at a Crossroads, it has a bizarre purgatorial world, a sense of unease and "how do I get out of this?", questions answered only by more questions, and many allegorical happenings. But the overall tone and ending are far more lighthearted, which brings me to the second comparison. It shares with Beautiful Dreamer a strong sense of whimsy and a world that feels consistent in a strange way, adhering to a set of unknown rules, even if those rules aren't at all explained. And both have strong writing.

Is it that similar to either of those games? Not really. But I'd recommend them if you liked this one. Play more games, they're fun.

Time to finish: ~10 min

Quote:

Every evening, a stork would peer into a lake looking for fish and shrimp to eat. One night, under the full moon, her shadow spoke to her from the bottom of the lake. “Come join me at the bottom of the lake. But you must pluck out your eyes first. You will not need them any longer.” So the stork plucked out her eyes and passed into the world beneath the surface. Only a few drops of blood remained on the water, but soon they, too, disappeared.

You're a 26-year-old NEET who starts hearing strange music in the house where you've been living depressed and friendless for many years. Shortly after, you find a lens that lets you see messages from extradimensional entities when you look through it. Things progress from there...

Absolutely love the surreal, disturbing atmosphere. Was a bit disappointed that the nameless entities you encounter basically boil down to (Spoiler - click to show)'things that kill everyone' in the end, though. I wanted something weirder to happen, and that was a letdown. Oh well.

Despite the disappointment of the ending, there's a lot of stuff in this game to be stunned by and incredible detail put into things. Besides the odd lens, there's also the black-and-white music video on the computer, the interactive fridge magnets, the interactive Walkman, the interactive piano... Loads of cool point-and-click interactivity here. Then there's the writing itself - the person you play as, Linus, has a wry sense of despair. Their (his?) "yeah whatever" response to all the weird stuff that happens really sells the vibe. And the writing's great. Lots of pithy, darkly ironic one-liners.

Excerpts:

- On a waste bin in the laundry room: "It's a graveyard for socks with holes in them and socks that have lost their twins. It's a good thing we don't treat humans the same way."
- On entering the kitchen: "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for the rest of his life. Give him a fridge, he'll become sedentary, forget his survival instinct, and be satisfied eating parmersan straight from the package."
- On coloring books: "These are my old coloring books. My mother kept them all, because she thought it was impressive that I managed to stay within the frame when coloring. My only talent: I never go overboard."
- On a window: "The glass has been fitted for over a year, but the frame has never been installed. It's a window that can't be opened. Just like my life."

If any of that resonates with you, go do yourself a favor and play this game!

Playtime: ~20 minutes

[Review initially written January 2024, edited April 2024]

I'm fascinated by the perspective switching in this one. It takes the seed and really puts it to good use. You get to see a heated, passive-aggressive confrontation between two couples, and man there's so much tension simmering beneath the surface even though their words to each other are perfectly cordial. Jumping from character to character as the argument progresses is jarring, but also a great way to capture the chaotic back-and-forth of the conversation.

I can't help but think this would be a great writing exercise - a way to illustrate the differences in perspective and how they can vary from person to person. But it's not just about perspective, it's about diving into each character's head and seeing what they want and like and dislike. It's a pleasant kind of whiplash and it really makes you feel like you're seeing the situation from four dimensions (everything at once!). Replayed a bunch of times.

Here's my DND story: The longest campaign I've been in ended after two sessions, but not before my character broke both legs jumping off a cliff and had to be carried around in a bag of holding for the rest of the game. I've done a few other oneshots, but nothing much. I've still been exposed to it enough to be familiar with the basic rules. Also, illithids are cool. In Baldur's Gate 3 that new DND game that everyone was raving about there are illithids and you get an illithid tadpole inside your brain and you can romance one and what was I saying again?

Anyway, so this game is heavily remniscient of my own DND experience. DND is complicated. There's all kinds of rules for combat and spells and levels and so on, and it can easily get overwhelming. When I played, sometimes one player's combat turn would take ten minutes while everyone else (myself included) browsed their phones until the rules and rolls finally got hashed out. Everyone was new to the game, including the DM, which didn't help. It's really not that beginner-friendly.

We still had fun, and there were some hilarious moments, but sometimes the tedium outweighed the fun. For not entirely unrelated reasons, I haven't done any kind of TTRPG in a long time.

Our main character at least has her girlfriend Rachel to help her out. Rachel can go a bit too far with the backseat DMing sometimes, but it's nothing too bad. I think the stuff you deal with in the game is mostly par for the course (and much better than what I've heard of on r/rpghorrorstories - now there's a subreddit to go to if you want to burn some time). Sure it has a supernatural bent to it, but players who talk out of character or get into silly arguments or make decisions the DM wasn't preparing for is just most DND sessions, in my limited experience. You have to roll with the punches. Which is what I ended up doing in my playthrough, and despite everything that went on we did make it to the end with some time to spare. (Side note, four hours seems pretty long for a first-time DND game, but I guess it makes sense if you want to play a oneshot all the way through and have someone more experienced to guide you. I personally feel like I'd be bored to death by the end, but this group of players is probably better than my group.)

I do have some UI quibbles that I think could've made the game a smoother experience: you're given info about the characters and the characters' characters (meta!) at the start of the game, but after that you can't really reference the info again, and it can be hard to remember it all. I never figured out exactly what the "Look around the table to see how everyone is doing" thing does - I think it shows you how distracted everyone is, but it's hard to check exactly since it only gives out textual descriptions. I got in the habit of barely checking it since the descriptions often don't change from one "turn" to the next. Also, is the general Distraction meter just for you, or is it for the whole table? If it's just for you, does every character have their own Distraction meter? But only yours is directly visible? Questions I wasn't totally sure about the answers to. Fun game overall, though.

This game is really trippy. And hilarious.

Took me a while to figure out you were supposed to give the meat to the dog - there was what seems like a red herring, where there's also a guy trying to discard meat in the alleyway outside the pizza place. But I never figured out what the point of that was and eventually obtained meat via the kitchen.

After that, the rest of it was fairly easy. Good game. I noticed a few typos and lightly implemented areas, but nothing to get too worked up about.

The one quibble I had was that initially, while I was fiddling around, I somehow managed to reach a point where I named the kitchen fridge "dog", and then couldn't interact with it even though the room description said the "dog" was in the room. My guess is that the security guard noticed it and took it away, but the fridge is still fixed to one place, so the description didn't change? I really have no clue, though. I was swapping a bunch of names around at once, so maybe I broke something and didn't realize it. I ended up restoring an earlier save and beat the game more easily when I knew where all the names were and didn't have to chase down the stray refrigerator or wastebasket running around the premises.

Also, the ending is amazing:

(Spoiler - click to show)
The gnome goes on: "I said you could expose a changeling with iron. That baby's not a changeling."

"What do you mean?" you say. "It's hideous!"

"Yeah, that's what human babies look like."


Overall, it took me about an hour to finish this game, because of the meat thing. Really smooth sailing after that. I'll also note I played the comp edition, so the game is even better now!

-

Highlights from my playthrough (contains the mildest of spoilers. IFDB is being finicky with nesting blockquotes inside spoilers, so I'll leave them unspoiled):

'Staring at the baby in the crib, you just can't believe it. That...thing just can't be human. There's no way. It looks like a shriveled apple with flailing hands and feet.'

'Oberon's Pizza Parlor'

'"No way that's a human," you say.

"Sounds like you have a changeling problem," says the gnome sitting next to you.

That's when you notice the gnome sitting next to you.'

'>x plants
Looks like grass. Seeing it survive in these harsh conditions fills you with determination.'

'>x counter
The counter looks like it's made of formica. You don't know what formica actually is or what it looks like, but this has got that weird texture and color that makes you think, "Yeah, that's formica."'

'>x memo
This note says:

Important:

Monitors are for night time use only. Daytime guards should be constantly on patrol!

Night time guards, for safety purposes, please remain inside the room and use monitors exclusively.

All guards should report promptly to loud noises, including screams'

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]

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]

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.

Here's a comment I made on the itch.io page, copied over because I figure it's long enough for a review and this game is cool:

THE COMPUTERFRIEND DATING SIM LIVES

I can finally die happy.

In all seriousness this wasn't what I expected from Computerfriend Dating Sim (was imagining a more computery love interest, with mouse and keyboard and everything? Computer monitor covered in lipstick. You know, the works) but this is fun too. Seems like this follows from the 'happiest' ending of Computerfriend, where you release the AI into the interwebz after undergoing a little psychological recovery of your own. Now you've returned to Godfield for whatever reason and the AI therapist is there to (possibly) have a one night stand with you. Also he doesn't tell you he happens to be your old therapist. (That might be some kind of professional integrity violation, but it seems C doesn't care. There are definitely worse one night stands to be had...)

It feels bittersweet, you've both changed and you can't go back to how things are, which is maybe why the relationship could never be more than a one night stand. Would get pretty awkward if you ever figured out C's real identity, I guess. Though I'll be real the fact that this isn't a 1 million word epic "I Slowly Fall In Love With My Former AI Therapist" is mildly disappointing.

There's something to be said too about the distance that you can create between C and the protagonist. By rebuffing his advances, you can tell youself that he's only a "thing" and you should be spending more time with people "like you". Pushing him away by thinking of him as a different species. Though in other parts the story makes it clear that you aren't so much different, both machines, in a way. Prediction engines. And, in the past, you were both held back from the real world by either depression (you) or the unfortunate state of being a digitally bound consciousness (C). Situations both of you have now escaped from.

Questions I can't answer: Is there any reason C is male specifically? Also is it just a one night stand or is there the potential for something bigger there, like you contact C again and become the bosomist of buddies and really fall in love (1 million word epic style)? Also what is the meaning of that bit you see from C's perspective and the poem you can get at the end? C seems somewhat critical of the protagonist, I mean, "it is more like me than I am... More a personality cluster than an individual, absorbing what it thinks will make it interesting" - harsh, dude - though also he seems afraid he might have hurt you ("Please don't picture me"). In the poem he essentially says he has a larger (digital) soul than you? (a statement about how existence as an AI has much more potential than existence as a human, as far as having 24/7 wifi access goes?) But also that the digital soul overflows into emotion and will eventually destroy him, even as you suck up the dregs? Or, I am not an English major and don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway very fun, 10/10 would not vacation in Godfield

---

TLDR: Play this if you liked Computerfriend. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Computerfriend given they might miss out on some important context, so the real takeaway is play Computerfriend first so you can understand everything! And so you can experience Computerfriend, which is a top tier game.

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."

"All you brats have been put through Vomit School, but you're the only one who learned anything there. And you have the motivation. Turn this business around, and you stand to inherit something."

A surreal business management sim about vomit. The gameplay is pretty bare-bones. Once you figure out a good set of expenditures - which is mainly a matter of changing the vomit formula - you can more or less stick with it. I won on my first try. (If only running a successful business in real life was that easy...)

A lot of the stats can be ignored - I didn't touch QA or training or processing, for example. The game could also stand to be way more clear on what some of the stats actually do. Right now most of the gameplay is "tweak stat, see if it does anything, repeat". Besides the vomit formula, the other stats I got the most mileage out of were wholesale price, varieties, and gallons produced. (Particularly, increasing varieties to 10 seems to up demand with no downside. What's up with that?) The formula guessing minigame is slightly fun, but also somewhat tedious. (The controls for changing ingredient percentages stat by stat can be really annoying, so I wonder if you could make different formula presets and have shortcuts for setting the balance to a specific formula?

Random events each quarter change the calculations, and though they initially have little impact, I found myself getting surprisingly invested in changing the numbers to max out profit. Capitalism, baby!

The little dialogue snippets you get every quarter are the real gem of this game, though, not the gameplay. Simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Best of all, the background events aren't totally random but follow a fixed storyline, and you can feel the economic shocks influence your decisions. (In other words: the war is the best part.) The author said this is just a proof of concept, and I hope we get more. Lots of storytelling potential here.

Excerpt:

"He's got his own vomit factory now?"

"Fuck no. He says that's unnatural. What he's started is a center for holistic vomit. That douchebag is telling people they need to rediscover their cultural heritage and reclaim the means of vomiting from the soulless clutches of fat cat industrialists."

"So?"

"So, he's charging people to come vomit in his ugly-ass clay pots."

"You mean he's paying them?"

"No, he's charging them, and those gullible fucks are eating it up!"

"...the new confessionals proliferated. They assign penance through complex and unknowable mechanisms, utilizing the latest advancements in computational theology. To many, confession whispered through a handset feels closer to God. Machines, after all, are humanity's bridge to the divine."

Really liked this game. Intimate, heartfelt, and true to life. Quite beautiful too.

The concept of coin-operated confessional booth is wonderful. It's the unity of man, machine, and divinity that gets me, the idea of God living in the wires and responding, in God's unknowable way, to what you have to say. And I love the concept of anonymous messages whispered in the dark, where you don't know who or what will ever hear you. Messages offered to anyone out there, if anyone's there at all.

It reminds me of websites out there where you can read anonymously-sourced confessions (https://loneliness.one/confession and https://postsecret.com/ come to mind, though a brief web search reveals dozens of sites like them). An alt-universe Internet, of sorts.

I thought you might be playing as someone offering a confession to one of these booths, but you're actually playing as the machine. Which is a killer concept, cherry on the cake really. There's only a limited amount of interaction you're allowed with people, because you can only interface with them through the machine. They can confess their deepest, darkest secrets to you and your only way to respond is through the perfectly mechanical choice of whether you accept the confession or not, and if you do, how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys you assign to them. You can't respond, you can't comfort or criticize them, you can't let them know you're there, even though you are. Yet the confession is only given because the interaction is so mechanical and impersonal that it's almost like nobody is there at all.

I'm also a fan of the setting: an alternate world much like our own, with comparable technology but a new history and new countries that imply a beautifully strange world beyond the confines of the tiny place we see. Reminds me of Disco Elysium a bit. And I gotta mention the sound and visual design, which sells the "just another night in a strange city almost but not quite like our own" ambiance. You see the city sleep, and you see it wake up again. Incredibly immersive. This game is great.

A nice slice-of-life story about family. The protagonist and their father go on a fishing trip together - the stuff of an old-timey family tale - but towards the end it's gradually revealed (Spoiler - click to show)the fishing takes place in OUTER SPACE and this is a science fiction story, hence the title. But despite the grandiose backdrop, the story focuses on the minutiae of everyday life, the intricacies of father-child relationships. The other stuff, really, is just a backdrop. (Spoiler - click to show)Even though humans have advanced to the outer boundaries of the solar system, family and all the complicated emotions that come with it still hold strong.

I wish there was less linearity in the story. You can make choices, but they don't influence much and some are never brought up again after you make them. There were also a few grammatical errors, which at times made it hard to parse what was happening. But I liked the overall atmosphere, especially the Twine theming. Blue-grey color scheme goes hard.

Finished in ~10 minutes.

It starts with one of those classic "you wake up confused and bound in an empty room" openings, but things quickly go haywire from there. As you eventually find out, your job is (Spoiler - click to show)containing demons for a temple by serving as their human vessel. All you have to do is let yourself be bound, then sleep in peace. Easy, right? But something's set the temple on fire, and the voices in your head are getting louder...

The game makes good use of its situation - at the start your past is uncertain, your identity is in flux, and there's multiple confusing voices in your head telling you what they think you should do. But as you play, you realize what your situation is and that makes the "right" choices more clear. In other words, this is one of those games that benefits hugely from repeat playthroughs. I played it four times and got, I think, all the endings. I think I can safely say (Spoiler - click to show)the voices in your head are supposed to be some degree of ambiguously evil. After I realized this I stopped murdering people, though to my disappointment it didn't seem to impact the endings at all.

(Spoiler - click to show)Demonic possession is kind of overplayed, and there are slightly unfortunate implications with the whole "people who hear voices are psychotic murderers" thing, but I'm personally fond of "voice in your head" narratives, and it did work well with the song.

Took me maybe ten minutes to get all the endings (lots of repeat text between the different paths). Having more story differences between the paths, or more elaboration on the world in general/what exactly are the voices in your head? could make the game feel more substantial. It was fun nonetheless.

This one didn't resonate with me as much as it did for some other people, maybe because I've never had a relationship like Kai and Caspian's. (The protagonist's name and gender is customizable, but I'll leave them as "Kai" for simplicity's sake.) I've never fallen in love with one of my friends, and I've never had a friend I've talked to consistently for more than a few years, actually. Which is kind of sad if you think about it.

But hold up, this isn't supposed to be about me! The game itself is pleasantly nostalgic, it rides the "childhood summers by the beach" vibe hard and does it well. My favorite part, though, is the endings. I found three different endings you can get, based on your choices - either (Spoiler - click to show)Kai doesn't meet Caspian and sells the house, doesn't meet Caspian but keeps the house, or meets Caspian and gets taken underwater by Caspian where presumably Caspian reveals that (le gasp) he was a merman all along! And then they live happily ever after.

The happy ending's fine, but the sad endings attract me more because that doesn't happen. Count on me to like the depressing stuff. They're made even more melancholy in context, when you realize everything Kai has lost forever by giving up on their dreams and succumbing to the dreariness of daily life. Abandoning their dreams of music to get a "real" job, moving away from their childhood beach home because their grandparents are dead. The ending I got first, where they just stare out at the ocean while thinking about everything they've lost, was a good one. There's no resolution there, just a friendship that ended on a sour note and a person they'll never meet again. Lost childhood memories you won't get back.

I dunno. The thing about the past is that you can't relive it, no matter how hard you try. So in this regard the happy ending feels like a fantasy to me and the tragic ones are more true-to-life. But maybe I'm just depressed.

Playtime: ~15 minutes

A very fun space romp. The story's punchy, flows well, doesn't waste words, gets to the main plot fast and resolves it just as fast. Fifteen or so minutes of fun.

Big fan of the spellbook - it has a nicely put together cover, too - and the symbol guessing minigame. Had a lot of fun casting spells you were not supposed to cast to get all the death endings. Hey, what if I cast this huge explosion spell inside a sealed space station? What could go wrong? The bad ending with Daffodil as a (Spoiler - click to show)weeping ball of flesh floating through cold space, eternally, sticks with me. The true ending is very sweet, though. Heartwarming stuff.

The characters are lightly sketched out, but the worldbuilding details are quite interesting. Besides the rad symbol system for spellcasting, there's the implication that the spaceside people are communists/anarchists (? - forgive me if I'm wrong, this kind of thing is not my forte) who "[provide] for each other according to need, not wealth". Sign me up. It's also pretty cool that both main characters use neopronouns. I'd read more stories set in this world.

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 ol' parser commands, while the blinking in this game is (I'm sorry Andrew Plotkin) a hundred times cooler.

Seriously, words cannot 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.

Playtime: about 10 minutes

(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.)

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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

---

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

An old favorite, so I had to give it five stars. I like "trapped in a strange world" stories, and this one delivers. The repetition, uncanny setting, and unexplained mysteries all work great together. Eerie piano music really sets the tone. I'm also a sucker for horror and mysterious non-euclidean spaces, so this idea of a purgatorial setting with a repeating crossroads checks all the right boxes. While it's never laid out explicitly, you get the sense that you've done something horrible and that your experience is a punishment for past sins. The scene with the feather sticks out as a reference to the Egyptian weighing of the soul and an implication that the protagonist is far from innocent.

The scenes themselves are subtle and off-putting in just the right ways. The imagery—empty zoo cages, train stations, clocks stuck before midnight—drives in that sense of stasis and inescapability. The ending is a total gut punch. (Spoiler - click to show)The desire to escape is the carrot that's been luring you along the whole time, and you finally reach the ending only to realize there's no escape, and you're doomed to repeat these events forever.

No idea what Dampe the gravedigger is, but "Harvest Moon meets Ligotti" means I had to play this one. (Used Firefox, but unlike the other reviewer had no issues with links.)

Thoughts: Lovely setting with classic Porpentine weirdness. Similar structure to With Those We Love Alive, possible shared setting based on mentions of the Skull Empire, wouldn't be surprised if they share a codebase. Been ages since I've played With Those We Love Alive, but both games have the same bed-to-bed structure where you wake up, work, wander around, and go back to sleep, in a fascinating alien world that becomes less fascinating as you wear out its excitements. Then it's only mundane. Depressing, even. Repetition turns it all into mindless drudgery.

Skulljhabit is like that, (Spoiler - click to show)and when you run out of things to do your only recourse is to leave. You end up in another town, with another job not so different from the first. The more things change the more they stay the same.

The ending was anticlimactic, but in a fitting way. This game is full of anticlimax and hints at greater revelations that never actually happen. There are recurring dreams and mysterious books that don't add up to anything. Not sure if there are multiple endings, but I feel like there aren't, and that smidgen of grandeur is all you get. A strange and melancholy story.

Playtime: around 35 min