Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

A short and completely linear Twine game with one ending and no choices. I liked it, though it was too short to really be affecting. The styling is somewhat simple, but it makes use of CSS effects for emphasis and cleverly-timed transitions to aid with pacing. The plot reminded me of the short stories I'd see on r/writingprompts, which often had the same thing going on: the entire story is (Spoiler - click to show)built up around one shocking plot twist that's foreshadowed in increasingly obvious ways before being revealed at the end, changing your opinion of everything that happened beforehand. Twist endings are common in short stories. The "this actually takes place after the apocalypse" twist is one I've seen a lot, e.g. in Michael Swanwick's "Walking Out", which is also a story that starts with what appears to be normal modern life and slowly reveals that it's not the case.

I thought this would be a story about what it's like to go grocery shopping when you're short on money, something all too many people have to live through. (Spoiler - click to show)Wrong: surprise apocalypse. But the writing is competent, and the slow buildup is fun. I feel like more could've been done with the ending to tie it into what I thought the game would be about, which was the crushing weight of poverty. Though I guess (Spoiler - click to show)crushing poverty can at times feel like the world has ended and nobody is left to see you struggle, and everything good you could've had is irrevocably lost - but I still think more of a connection could've been made, or something was missing.

You might expect a game about fascism to be angry and confrontational about why fascism is bad. This one is more indirect than that. I'm not even sure I ultimately got the point.

The title is certainly a reference to the Fascism - Off Topic thread that was created on intfiction.org in relation to the itch.io and Steam adult content bans, and the growing trend of internet censorship in the West. I caught that reference (and funnily enough, there's a movie poster featuring fictionalized versions of intfiction users that you can examine), but still felt too stupid to understand the game completely.

The game takes place in what seems to be a fascist US, in a subway in NYC. There are hints at a fascist takeover: the rundown subway, the ominous detail that there are "only a few people left riding".

The protagonist, from the x self response, seems to be onboard with the fascists: "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic." (Unless that was supposed to be irony, and I missed it, but the use of "clowns" feels too derogatory to be ironic. Or maybe that description is supposed to be from the narrator's perspective, and the protagonist is separate from the narrator, but the narrator seems to be an impartial spectator on every other occasion, so I doubt it.)

But the protagonist also has the option of interjecting in an argument between a couple on the subway to talk about how fascism works, indirectly accusing either the man or woman of fascism. The woman has cheated on the man; the man is confronting her not about that but about an Instagram post she made. Both are paranoid and controlling of the other. We don't know the content of the post, or the couple's political views.

If you interject (Spoiler - click to show)in a way that accuses the man, as I initially did, he fumes and asks "Is that what I am now? A fucking fascist?" If you interject and accuse the woman, which is what got me the true ending, the man just pointedly looks away and the story ends. If you interject at other times, your interjection about fascism is off-topic and the two react with confusion or disdain. For me, the whole situation was ambiguous and hard to read. Possibly the entire game is a shaggy dog joke based on the title: (Spoiler - click to show)when I got the true ending, it told me "You made fascism on-topic. You lost!"

I had a hard time figuring out when to interject for the true ending, and needed a fair number of tries to get the right timing: you need to do it (Spoiler - click to show)right after the woman says "Where are you going, then?"

My major point of confusion: I'm not sure if the fascist protagonist is the right kind of person to talk about the evils of fascism to random people on the subway. I can't imagine the kind of person who would describe himself as "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car... white, male, patriotic", and then read a news article about fascism and tell two strangers on the subway that "the enemy ain't anyone. The enemy is uncertainty". (I'd sooner expect this kind of person to explain how leftists/islamists/illegal immigrants/etc are the enemy.) Maybe I'm missing the life experience to comprehend this type of person. Is it supposed to be irony that the protagonist has read a news article about fascism and can spout eloquent talking points about it but can't comprehend that he currently lives under it? Is the point of the game that his words are empty and meaningless because he (presumably) supports the fascist government?

Another message of the game could be how life continues on as normal, no matter how awful the government becomes. The other people on the subway are browsing their phones or trying to get to Central Park, ignoring the argument, completely caught up in their own worlds. It speaks to the ability of humans to remain oblivious to what's going on around them, as long as their own lives can continue on unimpeded. No one can be bothered to get involved in strangers' problems. I did this the first time, too, hesitating to intervene until the man had left the subway car and the game informed me it was too late. --- But then, considering the lackluster response if you do intervene, and the protagonist's character in the first place, is intervention really a good thing? In this case, all you're really doing is getting involved in an argument between strangers. Are you actually helping people?

There's an element of helplessness in this game world, a world where awful things are happening far away and you can't see or prevent them. You can only deliver your off-topic monologue to strangers who are just as helpless as you. "maybe a bit something like... our own world currently, to be extremely heavy-handed about it."

No "fascism is bad" or "we must stop fascism"; just "fascism is off-topic".

This is a very short, very worthwhile horror story. There are no choices, but it has an impeccable atmosphere. Made for the Neo-Twiny jam in under 500 words, it takes barely any time to play and features awesome animations handdrawn by the creator. A hybrid of interactive fiction and a short horror animation you might find on Youtube or somesuch.

The story is surreal and open-ended in all the right ways. I recommend it.

From a comment I left on itch.io:

My theory about what happened is that (Spoiler - click to show)Malhar and Isabella were affected by some kind of anomalous effect, maybe the titular "Nihilist Syndrome", derived from a glitch in reality. The protagonist seems to be a computer scientist lecturing about computer memory, and the story places an emphasis on how contaminated data can result from improper memory allocation, causing incorrect behavior in the program, because the program is unable to distinguish between "real" and "false" data. To the computer, it's all real. "It'll run your program with those junk variables exactly as it's programmed to do, even if it destroys itself in the process." Malhar and Isabella were either real students who were contaminated and then erased by this junk data, or they were never real in the first place, solely products of junk data in reality that were then erased by some kind of reality garbage collector.

"Nothing about them was recognizable anymore-just a complete... deconstruction of the body..." By the time the universe gets to erasing them, they've been affected enough that people can no longer recognize them as human. It spreads to the area around them as well, affecting the cleanup process while their bodies are disposed of. People are incapable of reacting to their deaths, as if a mental block prevents them from acknowledging the glitch in reality. It also seems the glitch caused the professor's dwindling lecture attendance.

At the end, it's as if the students never existed. Either an antimemetic effect, or the cleanup made it so they retroactively never existed in the first place, except in the computer scientist's mind.

Reminds me of oldschool SCPs, in a good way.

I played this game more than a year ago, for Spring Thing 2024, but never got to publishing this review til I found it lying on my hard drive just now. Most of the review contains major spoilers due to the nature of the game, which I hid behind the spoiler block.

So you're part of a crime family and there's (Spoiler - click to show)a home intruder entering your apartment to kill you. Survive! It reminds me of a few other games I've seen on IFDB but haven't necessarily played. I know there's one where somebody enters your apartment with murderous intentions, and gameplay consists of setting up traps to kill them before they reach you.

This one is easier, since you can walk around the apartment while the intruder's there. Even after he enters the space you're in, you still get one turn to move somewhere else. So evading the guy is as easy as standing in one place and moving somewhere else if he comes over. The intruder is cleverly programmed, but I didn't dealing with him much of a challenge. Of course, then you have to deal with passively standing in a room while you listen to him take all your stuff, which is aggravating to say the least. Hey, you can't just take my phone and laptop. Those are mine! Sure, I couldn't figure out a way to unlock the phone (which is maddening, since there has to be a correct password hidden somewhere in the game and I couldn't find it) but that phone still belongs to me.

Another thing: part of me wonders if the intruder is real at all. There's the quote at the end of the game, for one:

"Your eyes snap open. The intruder has not yet opened the door. You slip out of bed, then head towards the counter.

You can do this."

This implies that it's all happening in the protagonist's imagination. Also the part where you have to survive the intrusion is told in future tense, not present, and seems to be what the protagonist is imagining will happen instead of what actually will happen. We don't see the intruder himself in-game. Sure, we imagine him killing us, but that's not the same as actually dying. It's why you get infinite attempts to survive.

I dunno. I discovered four endings: I where you get murdered, III where you wait it out evading the guy, IV where you attack him with a comforter so you can tie him up and interrogate him later, and V where you straight up kill him.

But my real question is what about Brookwood? Because get this: Brookwood is the person who set up this apartment for you, seemingly, and gave you the phone that you can't open because the password's incorrect, and gave you the safe that the intruder somehow knows the combination to. Is Brookwood pulling some double cross dagger-in-the-back schtick here? Because SOMEONE must've told the guy what the safe combination was, and there's only one other person mentioned in game who would know, I think. Of course, the other possibility is that the intruder doesn't exist and it's all imagination and paranoia. Who knows.

Anyway, it's a fun game. The introduction was really tedious, though. I get that it's supposed to capture the tedium of moving into a new apartment and dealing with chores, to some extent, but it took ages to get past and I didn't find it that helpful for teaching me the apartment's layout compared to the actually fun part of the game. That, plus the general ease of victory, are my main reasons for the three star rating.

It's still clear that an incredible amount of effort was put into this game, and the NPC behavior is exquisitely programmed.