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.
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.
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 will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them. All these other people have gotten their PhDs already. You don't want to fall behind.
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 soulless automatons who do what they're supposed to 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 passionate person who makes it into the good college as intended, there's another who becomes an anxiety-ridden hyperperfectionist because the surrounding culture has convinced them that this is how you win. They might even be the same person. 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?
[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?
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."