Reviews by EJ

High School Reunion

High School Reunion is a short Texture game about a man attending his 10th high school reunion. While standing outside feeling anxious about facing his peers, he encounters an old classmate who made it big in cryptocurrency, and events take a wild turn.

I get the impression that the author of High School Reunion is quite young; most people who are themselves out of high school wouldn't consider the 28-year-old PC an "old man". With expectations calibrated accordingly, High School Reunion is a reasonably amusing jaunt, showing a writer with a promising eye for a comic situation. I can definitely imagine (Spoiler - click to show)a protagonist stealing the identity of his douchey crypto millionaire ex-classmate, going to his reunion as that classmate, charming the girl of his dreams and taking her on a date to Wendy's of all places, and then getting beat up by the guy whose identity he stole in a Wendy's parking lot as an episode plot for a certain kind of sitcom.

But the difference between High School Reunion and an episode of something like Arrested Development or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, other than at least ten years of writing experience, is that High School Reunion is just a smidge too sympathetic to its protagonist; this guy is taking some pretty outrageous actions and ultimately getting hoist by his own petard, but the game doesn't quite shake the feeling that he's an underdog you should be rooting for and you should cheer when/if he gets the girl (even if he does also (Spoiler - click to show)get beat up in a Wendy's parking lot after winning her over). And I feel that undercuts this style of comedy. (Though there's perhaps a discussion to be had about how well "watch unlikeable guy get hoist by his own petard" comedy works to begin with in an interactive medium that tends to identify the audience more closely with the main character, also!)

So I would not say High School Reunion is an especially successful piece, but I do hope the writer keeps at it and continues honing their skills!

Everyone's Invited is a surreal, choice-based game in which the player character is trapped in a looping nightmare of a party where everyone around them is some sort of non-person making content-free conversation. You can go different places within the party, and maybe get some hints dropped about a shattered sense of self and a broken friendship, but hard facts and resolution are elusive.

The content warning about psychosis suggests that the game represents an experience of mental illness, and I can see that, but without that I might have taken it for a game about the kind of person who sees themself as the only "real" individual in a world of "NPCs". The PC is disdainful of the other people at the party and how they "look like exact copies" of each other and their inane conversation—"It's like... The world is exactly the same before they spoke as it is now." The only person they feel drawn to and sense is "real" seems to be some other version of themself. Not to say the PC seems content with their sense of superiority, though; they repeat "It's better to be alone" with the fervor and frequency of someone trying, not quite successfully, to convince themself.

This has what one might consider a visual-novel-style screen setup with images at the top and text at the bottom. The graphics are sketchy, pixelated, distorted; there is a constant warping or shimmering effect and human figures are cutouts full of moving, brightly-colored moiré patterns. (I don't have a problem with this, but I know some migraineurs do, and perhaps some people with motion sickness? So be forewarned.) Leaving aside the potential accessibility issues, it does seem like the creator was going for images that are uncomfortable and off-putting to look at, and they certainly accomplished that.

Now for the part where I admit to not really being a proper reviewer of the game: The text has a typewriter effect, and it says you can use the C key to speed it up but this doesn't seem to be true. I'm a fast reader who is frustrated by timed text I can't either turn off or speed up a lot, so I really struggled with this. As such, I did not reach an ending, if there is one to be reached. After going down a branch of the party scenario, the game loops back to the beginning of that sequence; I don't know if there's some kind of final scene once you've seen everything (or made the correct set of choices?) or if it just loops indefinitely. Because of the timed text, I only had the patience to run through the game twice. (I do appreciate it skipping the non-branching intro, at least, but there's still some repetitive stuff to get through at the beginning of the loop.) If there is an ending to be reached, I'm pretty sure the text speed prevents reaching it in under 15 minutes, so even the not-quite-exhaustive amount of it I played was a little more of a time commitment than I was expecting.

Surreal games about mental illness are certainly not new territory in IF and there are plenty of examples that are more polished than this one (such as perhaps having fewer comma splices), but Everyone's Invited does do a good job of evoking a tense, oppressive atmosphere, and if it were possible to disable the typewriter effect I would consider going back to fully explore what it has to offer.