Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil
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Because I don't make enough for how I use to be called a phase or a Bay Street afternoon-pick-me-up. I don't have the economic stability to actually fix the various reasons why my life is fucked up right now and quick fixes are the only ones accessible to me. I'm not affluent, so what I take is too street, and therefore morally reprehensible. There's nothing else to do in this shitty small town. There's no one else to do either. Because OSAP. Because child support. Because I'm homeless. Because I'm hungry. Because I can't afford to come down.---
I am poor enough to be called an addict.
I'm not
✔ white
✔ rich
✔ able-bodied
enough to be a user, so I'm shamed as an addict.
---
Found this game because it was linked in The end of the WORD as we know it, an art gallery of sorts that linked to other interactive fiction games. This game was one of the more obscure ones included. I found its discussion of drug use, and how drug users/addicts are treated, to be touching. In the US, where I'm from, both the rich and poor use drugs and become addicted to them, but the poor are more likely to be shamed for it. There are additional complexities around race and disability, which are discussed in-game. The game takes as a given that the player is familiar with criticism of the War on Drugs in the US and Canada and its history, and references arguments like these from the Drug Policy Alliance nonprofit, which advocates for less criminalization of drug use in the US.
For example, one of the historical facts the game cites is the criminalization of opium in the US after it became associated with poor Chinese workers:
Because my people were Chinese railroad workers whose puffing made lawmakers scared they were fucking all the white women, so they criminalized opium (except chugging and shooting it, because that was a white clean habit).
The association of opium use and poor Chinese-Americans, contributing to anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, is directly related to the forced import of opium into China by foreign traders, primarily British, in the 19th century. The two Opium Wars fought in the 1800s were a failed attempt by the Chinese government to prevent the illegal importation of opium into China by foreign merchants. Losing the war meant ports were forcibly opened to Western countries to keep doing business in, and this business included selling opium. Meanwhile, many wealthy American families, such as the Delanos, family of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, made fortunes in the Chinese opium trade. (Sources: the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the Opium Wars, and this article about American families and the Chinese opium trade, and this article on anti-Chinese racism and opium addiction.)
This is just for one sentence in the game, and other sentences reference statistics or histories I'm less familiar with. But the game isn't just about the history of opioids in the US. The core of it is about administrating Naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opioids and can restore breathing after opioid overdose. The story involves seeing someone suffering from an opioid overdose and saving their life through Naloxone.
I think a certain level of familiarity with the facts is best; I don't know if people who disagree with the message of this game, or are unfamiliar with the arguments, would find it affecting. I personally liked it.
I found this game because it was linked in another game called The end of the WORD as we know it, which was an art gallery of sorts. I thought, "Wait, isn't Nested made by the guy who did Cookie Clicker?" and I was right. He's made other things too, but I don't think any of it will ever exceed the popularity of Cookie Clicker.
Cookie Clicker probably doesn't qualify for IF at this point, though, while Nested does. It's a quite fascinating game, though "game" might be a disputed term since there's not much to do besides look at things. It reminds me of the procedural world generation found in Dwarf Fortress, but where Dwarf Fortress has a lot of game mechanics attached to the procedural generation, this game is nothing but the procedural generation. The procedural generation is the only point, and boy is there a lot of it. You start with a universe, but you can zoom in to galactic superclusters and star systems and planets and countries on those planets and cities in those countries containing houses containing aliens wearing leather cloaks and the skin cells in those cloaks which are made of atoms which contain quarks which contain inside them pathways to other universes... The overall effect is one of overwhelming scale.
It reminded me of this "Metric Paper" video by CGPGrey, which similarly zooms in and out of our own universe. Mindbending.
Found this game at random through the creator's blog. It's fascinating because it's in all appearances a Twine game, but it's also a chatroom/tiny MUD. In other words, if you're playing this game and you have an internet connection, you can talk to other people in the same room as you, and they can talk back.
There was no one there when I checked it out, presumably because it's been five years and everyone's forgotten about it now. It's a shame, since some features seem to require you to talk to other people to experience them in full, like the "language virus" stuff. I believe different objects can "infect" you with different language viruses when you interact with them, which briefly changes how your chat messages look in a fun way. But there was no one else around for me to talk to.
The creator runs an art gallery in Pittsburgh, which this game is a text-based recreation of. The game was created during COVID as one of the gallery's monthly exhibitions, which couldn't be hosted in person owing to the whole worldwide pandemic business.
The game doesn't contain much "game" stuff; there are no puzzles or anything. It's basically what it says on the tin: a recreation of the real-life gallery, with links to some other interactive fiction games as exhibits of sorts. I'd played most of the games that were linked to, but there were three I hadn't seen before. Two of them, Nested by Orteil and Administer Naloxone by Gollydrat, I checked out and enjoyed. There was also a longer one, Human Errors by Kathrine Morayati, which I haven't looked at yet.
I like it mainly for the multiplayer aspect. As a bonus, the game is open-source and the source code is openly available and easily moddable. Networked multiplayer is really complex and I want to dig into the code a bit to see how the creator did it. Extra stars for the cozy experience and the sheer impressiveness of turning a Twine game into a server-based multiplayer chatroom. It reminded me somewhat of ifMUD.
It's a game about depression. You wake up hungry in your dirty, cluttered mess of an apartment, and have the option to try to fix things, or not. Menus and environmental details provide flashbacks that tell you about the protagonist's life and how they got to this point. You also encounter metaphorical demons representing your emotional struggles.
The art is minimal and evocative, while the classical piano music set me on edge. I associate classical piano music with misery for various reasons and don't like it much. I suppose it's ultimately fitting for this game. The music was quiet enough to not distract from the text, either.
Though fictional, it's a personal kind of story. I imagine the player's response will vary depending on their own experiences and how much they can relate.
A lot of people go through situations like this, I guess, where you're not sure how to pull together the motivation to continue on. In the end, you either do or you don't. The protagonist seems to have no friends or family to talk to about their struggles, so they're left to deal with it on their own and the outside world doesn't really care whether they succeed or fail. It's a harsh fact that when you're alone and at your lowest point it doesn't even seem to matter whether you do the "right" thing or not, and whether you suffer a "victory" or "defeat" in the game people call "managing your mental health", one day will still become another, and you'll still have to keep addressing your own needs, trying to stay above water.
The TV channels evoked this the most for me. The cynical channel descriptions get at the soullessness of modern media that worships profit and lauds the perfect life you'll never have:
Shots of bright beaches, breathtaking vistas and luxurious resorts comprise the majority of a snazzy travel show. The host benevolently devotes 45 seconds of the hour-long program to visiting an orphanage in the impoverished exotic destination before a change of location to dig into a seven-course meal.
An ad filled with high-pitched singing, nauseatingly bright colors and boggle-eyed creatures entices you to buy toys branded off a popular children's show.
A news segment features footage from a nearby homeless encampment, while a scrolling ticker along the bottom of the screen screams about the stock market's record highs.
You find a cooking show featuring a celebrity chef using ingredients most folks would need to mortgage their home to afford. The host oohs in awe.
An elderly couple stare at each other in gentle adoration while a man breathlessly rattles off a list of medicinal side effects.
An ad for a charity comes on, filled with images of starving children and soft, tearjerking piano music.
You find a documentary about space tourism and watch for a few moments as the world's wealthiest leave the planet. You change the channel before they can return.
Generally speaking, the outside world doesn't care about you at all. It only makes your situation worse, if anything.
One of the harsher things about the protagonist's situation is that they're completely alone, and have no friends or acquaintances to ask for help. No one to talk to. In a state like this you really need to rely on your own will. Or maybe your money reserves - I was surprised money didn't play a larger role in this considering it's mentioned the protagonist grew up poor and they clearly don't seem to have a lot of money, but they seem to be able to afford food, at least. Even if they don't have the kind of parents who would let them return to the family mansion for a few months to convalesce after an unsuccessful venture, which is what the luckier have...
Things I might change: The interface can be awkward to navigate at times, and not all the description elements seem fully responsive. The TV sometimes couldn't get a channel description and just printed [undefined]. For example, the journal can be covered with a thin layer of dust, indicating disuse, even after you've just written in it. I also couldn't find a way to interact with the lightbulb after interacting with something else beforehand, since the link seems to only be in the room description, so I had to leave and come back first. Small things like this added up to make the experience less smooth. Also, the "defeating inner demons" thing may be a bit overplayed. Didn't do too much for me because it seemed to literalize the protagonist's interior state a bit too much - I would have preferred even more about the protagonist's life and family, though we do get plenty already.
I still liked this game, though. What I really like is the ending doesn't involve the protagonist's life being ruined forever or fixed forever. Change is incremental. Good and bad streaks can both be broken. But you have to keep trying, for as long as you can bear to.
Haven't actually gotten around to cleaning my microwave yet, but this game did remind me it's been a while since I did.
(As a side note: this game was initially made for a jam in 2023, which explains the 2024 US election-related news on the TV, along with the details about "the stock market's record highs", which unfortunately doesn't reflect current US reality last I checked.)
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