Reviews by Cerfeuil
Obscure Browser Games
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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.
I heard about this game because it was entered into the 2024 Independent Games Festival, and there were a few mentions of that on social media. It's a relatively short browser text adventure with excellent aesthetics and an intriguing setting. The beginning is a purposeful riff on A Dark Room, a short melancholic prologue, but it soon opens up in spectacular fashion. The rest is an exploration game that reminded me of Porpentine and other surreal IF I've played.
The music, sparse visuals and sleek CSS/JS create a fascinating UI. One log in the middle shows everything you've done, while objects to the side can be clicked on and interacted with. Connections, also hovering to the side, will take you to a new location when clicked. Everything is strategically placed to make it feel like you're truly walking around this decaying world while you scroll up and down.
The writing style has the same conservation of detail you find in games like their angelical understanding. Stark, minimalist sentences sketching out a surreal landscape, mentioning strange facts and never elaborating upon them. You get the sense of a far larger world beyond the game's confines, whose full history will never be explained.
Setting also gives me that Dark Souls/Porpentine feeling. It's a post-apocalyptic world defined by ruin: we've got a poison swamp and abandoned buildings and wind blowing through endless wastelands, outlined in neon pink and green against a dark background. The randomly-generated names for the protagonist and their monsters have Dark Souls boss vibes. Hallowed Exile, anyone? Weeping Knight? But what really makes the writing tick is a pervasive melancholy and isolation that comes across with each location, a longing for a world so long gone it's been forgotten in every way that matters. But it must have been better than this.
Individually, the sentences are just okay (there are a few comma splices). But combined with the music and gameplay, they shine.
There's also the monsters, part of the game's core conceit. They're represented as collections of squares that float around the screen, following you wherever you go. Clicking one opens an interface that lets you feed and further interact with it. I found myself not directly focused on them, more interested in exploring the setting, but I was attached to their little sound effects and the occasional notifications you get about them sleeping and releasing waste and so on. You can feed them, which is the primary purpose of the items you collect as you wander around. They are companions in the vast solitude of post-apocalyptic life. And they are supposed to, eventually, die.
I'd like to emphasize "supposed to". My main problem with this game is long before that happens, you run out of things to do. The description says "Travel with and care for small creatures, exploring an alienating, nostalgic world until the inevitable end of those creatures’ lives", and you do travel with and care for the creatures, but before any of them died I had already discovered everything there was to discover in the world. The process of discovery was great, and it's not a small game, so it took me about twenty minutes and maybe forty (?) locations to see everything. But nothing really changes in a location after you go there the first time.
Yeah, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a robed figure who can give you extra pets if you talk to them in the town and then swamp, but I could only find them once and never again. After that, it was just wandering around places I'd already been, looking for other new things and not finding them. Possibly I missed some important location or other, but I spent a while double-checking places I'd already been, and going through all the connections between places, so I don't think so.
I don't know how long creatures are supposed to live. Each of mine had a number slowly counting down from 100, which I assume is lifespan. Here's the thing: by the time I got bored and decided to end my game, the lowest lifespan counter I could see was still at, what, 70? The lifespan needs to be greatly reduced, or the number of things to do in the game greatly increased. Probably both. Alternatively, I would appreciate some kind of proper ending that could be discovered by exploring the game world and raising your monsters right, since I was looking for one but never found anything that felt satisfying. A part of me expected them to evolve based on how you feed them, but that never happens.
To the game's benefit, it does include one ending, which is how I terminated my playthrough. I wouldn't call it the satisfying ending I want, because (Spoiler - click to show)there is no resolution. Just ran out of things to do and decided to enter the wasteland and "forget myself", i.e. die, with my two creatures still around me. I could've beelined to that location and done that from the start, and it wouldn't have changed anything. It felt unsatisfactory to me. In some ways it's consistent with the themes of decay and a longing for something so far gone it can never be restored, but it didn't tie into anything I had done. And the prelude to that ending, wandering a world devoid of secrets because you've already discovered them all, wasn't fun and really took away from the joy of earlier gameplay. It doesn't help that some items in certain places respawn when I think they shouldn't, such as (Spoiler - click to show)the bones in the decaying hut. That feels like a genuine bug.
Despite the game's flaws, I'd still recommend it to people who like the aesthetics of Dark Souls and post-apocalyptic ruins. See the sights, you know?
One final note. The game has an account creation feature, and according to the itch.io page, apparently server-based multiplayer support. I didn't notice anything multiplayer when I was playing, but it's likely that nobody was playing at the same time as me, since this game is basically unknown. I don't know what effect multiple people playing at the same time would have, if any. It's possible that the server-based multiplayer support is just a way to easily save your progress. I made an account, but played through the game in one sitting so there was ultimately no need for it, and the ending I chose deleted my account anyway.
The itch.io page also says the game will get future updates, so maybe the game will be improved in the future. It'd be nice if we got more endings and more ways to interact with the monsters.
Quotes:
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.
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.
[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?
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 have gotten their PhDs already. All these other people will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them.
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 just soulless automatons who do what they're supposed to do 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 happy passionate person who makes it into the good college as intended, there are at least ten terrified kids trained into anxious self-hating hyperperfectionists because the surrounding culture has convinced them that HYPSMC hyperperfectionism is the only way to win. 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?
The game itself captures a bit of that experience. Not all of it. It's very light on story, compared to something like Pageant, and unlike Pageant you play as a self-insert with no specific personality. There are no other characters, either. People are only a component of the system, interacted with to raise or lower a number. No names or personalities exist in this game. There is no human interaction, only interaction with the system: work, study, work on apps, repeat. And there's no snippet of narrative with every choice you make to tell you what happens or how close you are to success. Time just silently advances.
The lack of feedback is one of the biggest differences from Pageant and PhD Simulator. In those games, you at least know what you're getting into, and how much work you need to put in to succeed. Here? College admissions processes are notoriously opaque. A person might get accepted at one college for what gets them rejected at another. You have no idea what you're supposed to do, what kind of person you're supposed to be, what kind of thing to focus on. Just grope around blindly and stress yourself out to the point of collapsing from exhaustion because you overwork yourself to the bone, not knowing how much to do and so trying to do everything at once, even if it's impossible.
There are mechanical criticisms you can make of this game. I don't like the approach the game takes towards "have a mental breakdown and be escorted to the mental asylum for a week" and "sleep for three days straight out of exhaustion". They're just punishments for letting your sanity/exhaustion drop to 0, and can happen over and over without any other consequences besides what's stated, which really lessens their impact. I would make it so that missing school from those events adds to your "School missed" counter. Or give multiple occurrences more severe consequences, or even have one be instant gameloss like in PhD Simulator. I also feel that more detailed narrative snippets would benefit the game, and it would be more impactful if it had a clearly defined protagonist who isn't just a featureless self-insert. But 31 Days hasn't been updated in years, so further change is unlikely.
Loads of people would find this game boring and lacking in detail. Without any individual payoff for each choice you make, you enter a pattern of mechanically clicking buttons with no idea what you're ultimately changing or if the result will be worth it. But that IS what elite college apps become for many people. Just look at all the Redditors who played and left comments saying "Sounds like real life".
Note: I've played this game twice and got rejected from all the HYPSMC colleges, both times. The second time I had a perfect 1600 SAT and one mental breakdown. Goes to show what all that work gets you.
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