Reviews by Cerfeuil

Riveting. A favorite, July 2, 2023

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.]

Doesn't live up to the concept, April 25, 2023

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.

Surreal and sad, April 25, 2023

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

Remember the friends you had in middle school?, March 8, 2023

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.

Slapstick comedy with absurd AI dialogue, March 5, 2023

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

It gets even better later on when you start to combine vocabulary, and end up with sentences like "when you are ready to introduce your puppy to the boilingpoint pour a thin layer of crumbs into the back of his teeth".

Fight dreams, sail the open sea, February 22, 2023

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

Skulljhabit but worse, February 22, 2023

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.

Linear but beautiful, February 22, 2023

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.

Wish there was more, January 18, 2023

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.

Extraordinarily clever control scheme, January 17, 2023

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 click with just one hand and, say, eat breakfast with the other. 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.

Playtime: about 30 minutes.