Reviews by EJ

The Legend of Horse Girl is a gleefully absurd take on Western tropes, starring a heroine raised by wild horses and featuring a bar staffed by coyotes, apparently sentient tumbleweeds, snake oil farmers, dairy spiders, and more. It’s also pure, (mostly) unadulterated fun. I am not exaggerating when I say I laughed out loud multiple times while playing this game. I was unreasonably amused when the character Butch McCreedy turned out to have a twin named Femme McCreedy, for example. And then there’s one puzzle solution that involves (Spoiler - click to show)dunking bats in milk as if they were cookies until they get fed up with this treatment and fly away, the mental image of which just killed me. (I thought I was going to be (Spoiler - click to show)actually drowning them, which would have been ridiculous enough, but the way it played out was funnier.)

Speaking of the puzzle solutions, they’re generally just as absurd as everything else in the world of the game, but most of them are signposted well enough that it works anyway. Given that the gameplay is very straightforward (get items, use them on other items, repeat) and requires few unusual verbs, one could say that trying to figure out what might work per the internal logic (such as it is) of the zany setting is the puzzle, in most cases. And when that works, it’s tremendously satisfying. There were a few places in which the leap of logic the game wanted me to make was a bit too far for me; I don’t know if there were things in the game that I missed that would have hinted at these solutions, though.

I did wish a little bit for a built-in hints function, although the list of necessary verbs in the “about” text sometimes proved helpful – not so much for guess-the-verb issues, which I didn’t feel the game had many of, but because in some cases the very presence of a verb in the list hinted at an approach to a puzzle. Also on the subject of quality-of-life features, I did appreciate that the game usually removes objects from your inventory if you don’t need them anymore.

There was also one aspect of the structure with which I struggled a bit: you can, essentially, encounter the introductions to the majority of the game’s puzzles right off the bat, without even beginning to solve anything. This made it sometimes unclear to me what order I should be trying to solve the puzzles in, and whether I didn’t have what I needed to solve a particular puzzle yet (probably because it was gated behind the solution to some other puzzle) or whether I did but hadn’t figured out how to use it. But this is, I think, not an objective flaw but a matter of taste – I personally get a little overwhelmed by having a ton of "open" puzzles at the same time, but others might prefer that to a more linear approach.

And in the end, the charm of the writing carried me through these minor frustrations without much difficulty. Despite any nitpicks, I had an absolute blast playing this game, and that’s the important thing.

My favorite kind of horror fiction is the kind where supernatural horror elements are used to explore struggles that people face in the real world. Thin Walls takes this approach to a topic I haven’t seen explored in this way before: having housemates.

This probably sounds like a joke, especially if you’ve never lived in shared housing, but Thin Walls is very serious about this, and so am I. Like the characters in this game, I live in a very expensive city and I spent most of my 20s unable to afford rent on an apartment of my own, instead living with a series of housemates, most of whom I knew very little if at all before moving in. Having strangers in your space all the time can be draining, and for me, at least, housemates rarely became much more than strangers. It’s hard to be friends with someone when long before the point where you could really get to know them as people, you already know that they like to practice guitar in the living room at 1 AM, or that they refuse to touch anything that might be even a little bit dirty (thus leaving you to do all the cleaning), or that they keep using your dishes even though you put a sign on the cabinet saying “EJ'S DISHES, PLEASE ASK BEFORE USING.” Or, in the game’s own words:

“If you live with friends or with a partner, and something goes wrong, there is a relationship, a history, a memory to cushion you: the knowledge that, overall, this person is actually okay.

“But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it.”

The house in Thin Walls is continuously growing of its own accord; it increases in size every time two tenants have a spat, but somehow never provides them enough room to get out of each other’s hair. The number of bedrooms may be endless – allowing ever more tenants to move in and exacerbate the existing problems – but there are still the pitfalls of shared kitchens and bathrooms, and of course there’s the issue of noise (see title). We see these problems through the eyes of a kaleidoscopic array of tenants, each with their own worries and frustrations, their own reasons for being here and for not being able to leave. (Some don’t in fact want to leave – but most do.)

However, while it may at first look like the game’s thesis is that hell is other people (a bookshelf that appears at one point contains a copy of No Exit, alongside House of Leaves and other relevant titles), as you progress it becomes clear that the real horror is the conditions that get people stuck in this situation to begin with: ever-rising rents, lack of opportunity, and, of course, unscrupulous landlords.

Eddie, the landlord of the uncanny house in Thin Walls, never appears onscreen, but his shadow looms large over its residents all the same (Waiting for Godot is also on the bookshelf). Tenants report sightings of him as if he were some sort of cryptid. His leather jacket appears by the door and then disappears again, but no one sees him enter or leave. (The game doesn’t get much into this, but I imagine his elusive nature would make it difficult to get in touch with him if you ever needed something repaired.) Nevertheless, somehow rooms keep on getting rented out, and someone’s collecting the rent money.

Many unscrupulous landlords I’ve had were doing things that were probably or definitely illegal, but they were essentially untouchable because anyone with the resources to get them in trouble for it wouldn’t be renting from them in the first place. Eddie, it seems, doesn’t even have a license to rent out rooms, but he is literally untouchable – how can the borough council do anything about the transgressions of a phantom?

Though the title page uses default Twine CSS, the game itself does not; the design is simple, but very readable, and makes good use of changing background colors to indicate different points of view.

My only complaint is that, while it’s obvious when a new chapter has opened up, it’s not always obvious what you need to do to trigger one, and generally just involved going into every available room until I found the one where something had changed. But that’s a minor quibble – overall, Thin Walls is a well-written piece of surreal (but also, very real) horror that resonated deeply with me.

I tend to find IF with animal player characters very charming, especially if the author really sells the idea that the character’s perception of the world is different from that of a human. The Bright Blue Ball does a good job here – I like that the PC experiences the world mostly through smells, as many dog breeds do. The descriptions of scents were simple, but well chosen, and since smell is a sense that IF usually does not do much with, it gave the game a fresh feeling. Parlaying this into a game mechanic of tracking objects by scent was also a fun and unusual idea, if a little under-used here. I also appreciated the hint system – something a lot of first-time authors don’t think to include.

(On a side note, I was delighted that “bark” was a recognized command, but my childhood dog would have been disappointed that “chew [noun]” was not.)

Unfortunately the game does have a lot of the problems common to first-time parser authors, such as under-implementation, missing descriptions, and accidentally unlisted exits, the latter of which led to a few instances where I had to figure out how to progress by repeatedly bumping into walls (which, to be fair, is not out of character for many Golden Retrievers I have known). But these things are fixable, and I think the fun concept and endearing writing speak to the author’s potential.

The Fall of Asemia is a game about language, or a game about history and culture and the fact that these are necessarily mediated through language, which is something that can be lost. I suspect Asemia’s name comes from Greek: the negative prefix a- and the root sema, or “sign,” as in semantikos, “significance,” whence the English word “semantic.”

Asemia is not without signs, and those signs are not without meaning, but those signs are no longer legible to most people in the world in which the game takes place. The PC is charged with translating them, but seems unsatisfied with her ability to do so. Translation is always a challenge, but beyond that, the protagonist seems to be dragged down by the weight of the responsibility of serving as a conduit for the lost voices of the Asemians. Or perhaps not – we only see her in a few brief exchanges in between the translated journal entries that make up the bulk of the game, and though her stress and feelings of inadequacy are clear, the reasons for them are open to interpretation. But I did feel like there was a lot going on in between the lines.

The game is mainly played by clicking on glyphs to change them and reading the journal entries that result. The glyphs are lovely, aesthetically, and I was impressed by the fact that those of the five Asemian journal-writers managed to look like the same language in different handwriting, while those of the soldier of the invading force were immediately recognizable as a different language. I did find it somewhat hard to remember which glyphs I had chosen before and which I hadn’t, and I’m not entirely sure whether the texts I saw were sometimes quite similar because I was accidentally selecting glyphs I’d already seen or because changing glyphs doesn’t necessarily change sentences in the way I initially assumed it did.

I also have to admit that it bothers me a little that, although the conceit is that the player character is translating the glyphs, what the player is doing seems not to be interpreting, but rather changing the source text. Unless we’re supposed to take it that the player character has fragments that she’s trying to arrange in the correct order? Regardless, I would have liked a little more clear connection between what I was doing in the game and what the PC was supposed to be doing in-universe.

Regardless, the translated texts convey the Asemians’ sense of loss and displacement with painful clarity. They are often poetic (“The strange vowels of this province flood my mouth like chewing on leather. Someone has painted the sky a different color”), and even the blunter and more straightforward passages, mostly courtesy of a child diarist, sometimes contain surprising and effective imagery (“I don't even know the name of this town, but the clouds here make me want to punch them in the face”). The banal brutality of the invaders is also starkly apparent; one passage, after talking about mass executions, concludes with a complaint about the music tastes of the original residents of the writer’s stolen apartment (“The records are mostly jazz. Who likes jazz?”).

Ultimately, despite my complaints about the relationship of the interactivity to the narrative, I did find The Fall of Asemia to be an intriguing and memorable experience, and though the short length of the game meant that its exploration of the intertwining of language, culture, and history did not have room to be very in-depth, it was well-executed.