Ratings and Reviews by EJ

This is set up as a classic piece of “explore a weird and architecturally impossible house” horror, and the uncanniness does escalate nicely, especially if you decide to turn back at any point. Instead of reaching a spooky climax, however, the endings present situations that are merely sort of odd, and the PC’s muted reaction (“Huh.”) contributes to the draining of tension.

I suppose it feels a little like games you play as a child to try to scare yourself, or even just the experience of walking down the hall to the bathroom at night at an age where that passes for spooky. Coming out in the light and finding nothing too badly amiss is somewhat fitting for that kind of vibe. But as a grown-up I think I’d prefer some actual payoff.

This is unfortunately one of the less accessible pieces I’ve encountered in this year’s ECTOCOMP, and I don’t mean that in the way that poetry can be inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the artform. I know I repeat this constantly, but please, please use a contrast checker to make sure your text is legible. This gave me a headache to read. Also, I don’t usually complain about font sizes since that’s the easiest thing to change on the user’s end—any old browser will do it—but as someone who doesn’t generally need to boost the font size for vision reasons I did need to boost it here because it is tiny and my poor fine motor control was not up to clicking to continue when the target was so small.

The chained poem conceit is interesting, with each poem taking the last line of the previous as the first line and spinning off into a different direction with it, and the poems cover many different topics. The one that stuck with me most was the one about relatives squabbling over an inheritance, which I thought made interesting use of the unique affordances of the medium in what it was doing with cycling links. The rest of the poems don’t really make use of anything besides (sometimes very slow) timed text; I see in theory why that’s appealing to a poet and seems like a natural outgrowth of the way line breaks and general space on the page are used in static poetry, but I personally did not feel like it added to the experience. I do think there’s promise here and I would be interested to see more interactive poetry that really explored the question of “what can you do with interactive poetry that you can’t do with the regular on-paper kind?” (Other than make the text fade in really slowly.)

The least important thing about this game is that every time I see the title I start humming the similarly-titled folk song, and I don't want to be the only one doing that so I'm sharing it with you. You're welcome.

Moving along, Beneath the Weeping Willow is an Ink game where you play as a ghost. A couple of vacationers have rented out your old house on AirB&B on Halloween night, the only night you can interact with the living, so this is your one shot to try to get them to solve the mystery of your death and lay you to rest properly. Despite the ghost situation, the spookiness factor is low, and the general atmosphere is one of autumnal coziness tempered by slight melancholy.

You can’t interact with your guests directly, so it’s a matter of figuring out what you can interact with, what effect it will have, and how the guests move around the house at various points in the evening. Restarting at least once may be necessary, as the whole thing is on a tight timer. The apparent complexity of it really impressed me given the four-hour limit on a Petite Mort game. In general, I found it surprisingly polished and rewarding to play, and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a satisfying bite-sized puzzle game of moderate difficulty.

Sometimes the mechanisms we develop to protect ourselves or make ourselves feel better outlive their usefulness and become actually detrimental. (Sometimes, also, they weren’t that healthy to start with.) They can spin out of control and start running your life while you feel helpless to break free of them and do the things you actually want to do.

Also, some types of internalized bigotry can create a kind of double-think, especially for a well-meaning person who wants to extend some understanding to others: Here’s why it’s okay for other people to be like this, but not for me. It’s perfectly valid and I wouldn’t judge people for it, it’s just that I don’t have it bad enough to really count. Of course, despite one’s best intentions, this often ends up manifesting in ways that do hurt others, especially if they remind you of yourself.

To elucidate how I Got You explores these themes would be to spoil several of the turns its narrative takes over its relatively short play time, and I do think it’s better to go into it with minimal knowledge about where it’s going, but I will say I found it effective and relatable.

When I first played it, I assumed this was an "illusion of choice" type of game; the outcome I got felt fairly inevitable, and a lot of time choices that I made that were too honest or vulnerable got redirected to a "safer" choice, so I assumed that would happen regardless of what you chose. But in fact it turns out that options that are silly or obviously inappropriate will not be redirected, and you can choose those and see a wildly different version of events in which nothing very horrific happens to you because you self-sabotaged to avoid confronting how you really feel. So that's... good...? (Well, narratively and as a way of using interactivity, it's very effective! For the PC, though, hard to say what's a better outcome.)

Detective en habitación cerrada es un juego de Inform alucinante protagonizado por un detective que sólo puede investigarse a sí mismo. Sin embargo, necesita un delito que investigar, un cliente y un culpable; descubrir cómo conseguirlos es el objetivo del juego.

El tono de la narración es sarcástico, y la premisa se utiliza para satirizar el individualismo y la privatización, deleitándose con un juego de palabras sobre los distintos significados de “privado”. La prosa es uno de los puntos fuertes del juego (aunque la perspectiva cambia de segunda a primera persona a veces; no se si era intencional).

Una vez que entendí la mecánica básica, pude avanzar bien un rato, pero hacia el final empecé a tener problemas con entender la lógica, aunque parece que me he encontrado con algún error en el juego.

Al final logré resolver el caso; el resultado no fue precisamente un final feliz, pero en este juego me sorprendería si algo así fuera posible. En general disfruté de la experiencia.

Detective en habitación cerrada is a mind-bending Inform game featuring a detective who can only investigate himself. Nevertheless, he needs a crime to investigate, a client, and a culprit; figuring out how to produce these things is the goal of the game.

The tone of the narration is sarcastic, and the premise is used to satirize individualism and privatization, playing on different meanings of “private”. The writing is generally a strong point of the game (though the point of view slips from second person to first person at times; I wasn’t sure if that was intentional).

Once I figured out the basic mechanics, I was able to make good progress for a while, but towards the end I started to struggle with the logic, although it seems like I may have encountered a bug in the game.

In the end I did manage to solve the case; the result was not exactly a happy ending, but in this game I would be surprised if such a thing were possible. Overall I enjoyed the experience.

Go-Strange-Ghost Range is one of Andrew Schultz’s oronym games in the vein of Why Pout and Us Too. If you’ve played those games, you likely know whether you’ll enjoy this one; if not, this might be a good way to see how you get on with this particular form of wordplay-based gameplay, since it’s a short and straightforward experience. There is a particular order puzzles need to be solved in, but you’re not keeping track of a complex interlocking set of dependencies like in the longer games. A set of progressive hints is available for each room, I believe, although I only needed to turn to them once. The whole thing is remarkably smooth for speed IF, and in general I found it a delightful little morsel.

Especially impressive is that this (and its two companion games) was created in Adventuron, so none of the code from the previous oronym games was used. As an added bonus, this has allowed the addition of pixel graphics, which are an endearing supplement to the game’s whimsy.

Dad’s Shiva is a choice-based game about visiting your sister during the official mourning period for your father, though you didn’t have a good relationship with either of them. The family’s past is a thorny mess of hurt and secrets and resentment (mind the content warnings if you’re sensitive to stories about child abuse), and while poking around your sister’s apartment you can ferret some things out, but you can’t really fix anything.

The writing is simple and effective, and I liked the specificity of the New York Jewish community that it’s set in, reflected in the details of the setting and the distinctive Yiddish-inflected syntax of some of the dialogue. The PC is a little bit of an enigma outside of their trauma; the true character centerpiece is not the PC nor even the titular father, but the PC’s sister, Miranda, who is complicated and unpleasant but not one-dimensionally hateable.

The endings deny any real closure or catharsis; I wouldn’t say they come unexpectedly, but there’s an uneasy sense of non-resolution, a lack of some significant final action to take. Which is perfectly appropriate to the subject matter; really, anything else might have felt too pat.