Reviews by Cerfeuil

Stunningly eerie horror game, April 15, 2024

You're a 26-year-old NEET who starts hearing strange music in the house where you've been living depressed and friendless for many years. Shortly after, you find a lens that lets you see messages from extradimensional entities when you look through it. Things progress from there...

Absolutely love the surreal, disturbing atmosphere. Was a bit disappointed that the nameless entities you encounter basically boil down to (Spoiler - click to show)'things that kill everyone' in the end, though. I wanted something weirder to happen, and that was a letdown. Oh well.

Despite the disappointment of the ending, there's a lot of stuff in this game to be stunned by and incredible detail put into things. Besides the odd lens, there's also the black-and-white music video on the computer, the interactive fridge magnets, the interactive Walkman, the interactive piano... Loads of cool point-and-click interactivity here. Then there's the writing itself - the person you play as, Linus, has a wry sense of despair. Their (his?) "yeah whatever" response to all the weird stuff that happens really sells the vibe. And the writing's great. Lots of pithy, darkly ironic one-liners.

Excerpts:

- On a waste bin in the laundry room: "It's a graveyard for socks with holes in them and socks that have lost their twins. It's a good thing we don't treat humans the same way."
- On entering the kitchen: "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for the rest of his life. Give him a fridge, he'll become sedentary, forget his survival instinct, and be satisfied eating parmersan straight from the package."
- On coloring books: "These are my old coloring books. My mother kept them all, because she thought it was impressive that I managed to stay within the frame when coloring. My only talent: I never go overboard."
- On a window: "The glass has been fitted for over a year, but the frame has never been installed. It's a window that can't be opened. Just like my life."

If any of that resonates with you, go do yourself a favor and play this game!

Playtime: ~20 minutes

[Review initially written January 2024, edited April 2024]

Short, darkly comedic business sim, January 24, 2024

"All you brats have been put through Vomit School, but you're the only one who learned anything there. And you have the motivation. Turn this business around, and you stand to inherit something."

A surreal business management sim about vomit. The gameplay is pretty bare-bones. Once you figure out a good set of expenditures - which is mainly a matter of changing the vomit formula - you can more or less stick with it. I won on my first try. (If only running a successful business in real life was that easy...)

A lot of the stats can be ignored - I didn't touch QA or training or processing, for example. The game could also stand to be way more clear on what some of the stats actually do. Right now most of the gameplay is "tweak stat, see if it does anything, repeat". Besides the vomit formula, the other stats I got the most mileage out of were wholesale price, varieties, and gallons produced. (Particularly, increasing varieties to 10 seems to up demand with no downside. What's up with that?) The formula guessing minigame is slightly fun, but also somewhat tedious. (The controls for changing ingredient percentages stat by stat can be really annoying, so I wonder if you could make different formula presets and have shortcuts for setting the balance to a specific formula?

Random events each quarter change the calculations, and though they initially have little impact, I found myself getting surprisingly invested in changing the numbers to max out profit. Capitalism, baby!

The little dialogue snippets you get every quarter are the real gem of this game, though, not the gameplay. Simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Best of all, the background events aren't totally random but follow a fixed storyline, and you can feel the economic shocks influence your decisions. (In other words: the war is the best part.) The author said this is just a proof of concept, and I hope we get more. Lots of storytelling potential here.

Excerpt:

"He's got his own vomit factory now?"

"Fuck no. He says that's unnatural. What he's started is a center for holistic vomit. That douchebag is telling people they need to rediscover their cultural heritage and reclaim the means of vomiting from the soulless clutches of fat cat industrialists."

"So?"

"So, he's charging people to come vomit in his ugly-ass clay pots."

"You mean he's paying them?"

"No, he's charging them, and those gullible fucks are eating it up!"

At the end, I had 2,261,644 dollars in the bank after about 30 min of playtime. I'm rich.

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, 2024

A 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, 2024

It 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, 2024

This 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, 2024

A 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, 2024

This 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, 2024

I'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.