Reviews by Cerfeuil
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Is anyone listening?, January 24, 2024"...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.
Interesting mood piece, January 24, 2024A 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.
Short dark fantasy story, January 24, 2024It 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.
Nostalgic love story, January 24, 2024This 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
WIZARDS... IN SPACE!, January 24, 2024A 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.
Short study in mood and character, January 24, 2024This 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
Short surreal horror game, January 24, 2024I'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.
Insanely cool and unique, November 9, 2023Out 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.)
AI utopia win, July 5, 2023I 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.
Spoiler block to save space, actual spoilers inside will still be marked:
(Spoiler - click to show)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
Eerie dream exploration, July 2, 2023I'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.
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