Ratings and Reviews by EJ

Ataraxia is a small-town life simulation game that takes cues from “cozy” games like Stardew Valley while having a more melancholy tone and some horror elements. As a recent arrival to a wooded island, you must make friends in the community and make money by crafting with found materials while learning about the island’s sometimes bloody history and investigating something strange in the woods.

The daily gameplay loop of waking up, tending your garden (once you have plants to tend), crafting, and visiting various locations is satisfying; the only fly in the ointment is that the game obscures how much energy you start with and how much each action takes, so it’s hard to plan out how much exactly to do. But as there are no hard deadlines here, it doesn’t matter especially much. And with the helpful to-do list, I never lost track of what my goals were.

The prose is lovely, especially in the more surreal scenes, and the atmosphere is strong. The characters are delicately drawn, a little more grounded than usual for the genre; that they're a bit older and have loves and losses and career changes behind them is a nice change of pace. The island’s history of beasts and pirates and missing children is intriguing to uncover, doled out piece by piece to propel you through the game.

Sometimes the game genre and the horror trappings sit awkwardly alongside each other. When I realized the cryptic utterances of the oracle in the forest were just to tell you what kind of gift each potential love interest likes best, that was jarring, and the resolution of the plotline with the strange presence in the forest being just an artifact you can put in your museum was a bit anticlimactic.

But this is a minor complaint. I enjoyed playing Ataraxia, all the more so for its sharp edges and dark mood. I romanced an ex-sailor, adopted a cat, grew various fruits and veg, opened a museum, and maybe got possessed a little bit. I had a good time.

I would recommend Ataraxia to anyone who has ever looked at a cute farming sim and gone “okay, the idea of this is somewhat appealing, but what I would really like is if it had some eldritch forest deities and a sense of quiet tragedy, and if all the love interests seemed like they were probably at least 30.”

Making a satisfying piece of IF in under 500 words is hard. Though I’m a vocal short-fiction aficionado, I find a lot of Neo-Twiny Jam works miss the mark for me; they often tackle concepts that are too big for the word count to handle in a way that feels complete, especially if there’s branching.

The Moon’s Knight deals with this by zooming in on a single moment in a toxic relationship, a moment when one lover chooses whether to trust the other or not. It lets poetic language and a sort of allegorical approach (the fickle beloved is literally the Moon) carry the emotional weight instead of trying to establish two realistic, well-rounded characters and sell the player on caring about them in so short a time, which I think is a good move. The language is rhythmic and alliteration-focused, which, in combination with the subject matter of knights riding into battle, is strongly reminiscent of Old English/Middle English poetry. I mention this because I enjoy that kind of thing, but also because it suggests we’re also drawing on the medieval framework of courtly love here, with its treatment of a knight longing for an unattainable lady and laying down their life for her as an ideal to be aspired to. (The Moon’s Knight takes a darker view of this, of course.)

My only criticism is that I feel the import of the game’s one choice isn’t particularly clear before you make it, depriving me as the player of the ability to feel a faint echo of the player character’s agony at deciding whether to risk her life to trust a lover who has been known to be inconstant, or whether to blatantly demonstrate her distrust. Instead my feeling on the first go-round was “I guess I’ll just pick something and see what happens?” which seems like perhaps not what the piece is aiming for. Making it clearer ahead of the choice that the Moon has promised the knight her protection (probably when first mentioning/describing the ampoule?) would have given the choice more impact the first time for me.

But other than that, it’s a striking piece that does a good job of making its emotional point in an economical number of words.