Reviews by verityvirtue

The PC looks after her mother's exhibition about memory and family. In some ways, this should be her magnum opus. As the PC goes around, as a very special gallery attendee more than a night guard, each painting brings up a memory centering the PC's mother, whose complexities still shape the PC's life posthumously.

To appreciate art can itself be a form of interpretation - and it is here reality-shaping, too, in the way of dreams. For a game about visual art, it doesn't itself have too much visual content, and I think that keeps the focus on the text: it is not so much the appearance of the paintings that gives them their power, but the significance to the narrator.

The horror aspect starts fairly mundane, but quickly takes on a hallucinatory quality. But what makes Night Guard / Morning Star really powerful is its emotional heart: a daughter's fractious, stubborn, evolving relationship with her mother.

You, the PC, are Larry, a beachcomber with little to your name. A mysterious fish bowl appears in your shack one day, triggering a series of ominous events.

In true game logic, each event is triggered by someone seemingly innocuous, only significant because of the relative nothingness. It's pretty short, but structured as two parallel threads, one of which bleeds into the other. The elements of one are mirrored in the other and invite replay.

This may not be the most polished, but it is certainly effective in telling a bleak, surreal horror story.

The IFComp last place has been, in my memory, a place for outright offensive, completely broken or minimum-effort games. This game is none of those: this is a perfectly functional Twine game, narrated entirely in Socratic questioning (or similar). It asks deeply conceptual questions such as "What is desire?". The answers are... well, some answers looped back to previous questions, which is either inspired, or plain frustrating.

Not to read too deeply into it but I had expected the A and B answers to present some sort of dichotomy, perhaps representing two schools of thought. It does not; both present themselves as streams of very similar advice.

I came out of this more confused than before, if nothing else.

This is no great work of art. But as the Online Safety Act looms in the UK, and linking online identity to real-world legal identity becomes a possibility under the guise of "protecting the children" (isn't it always?), the advice in this game takes on a subversive tone.

This game is genuinely an incomplete, minimally branching work, with the barest pretense of story. But the irony of Google links and plaintext passwords is not lost on me.

Works better as a meta-narrative, probably.

Time spent: 30-45 mins

You find yourself in a whale. Survive.

It is not a personal slight to the writers that I was not moved.

The text declares a lot of terror and nightmarish qualities, but fails to describe it, or illustrate any existential threat or urgency to the player character. Even the NPC interactions seem mostly benign. I found little to anchor myself and have an emotional stake in the PC; even less to understand if there was a threat to them at all.

The writing is blatantly transparent about the story’s scope - at every major choice, the player is reminded of the key stat, sanity, and number of passages explored. However, the Sanity stat seems to act as a binary switch rather than, e.g. a way of colouring the PC’s perceptions. (Spoiler - click to show)It was hard to tell which choices reduced it, and there was little to no sense of threat when it reduced to zero. One of the scenes when the PC reaches zero sanity becomes a “get out” clause, which felt reductive - I thought I would have to work through the consequences of my actions.

There were lots of potentially juicy themes that went unexplored. The loss of control, being at the mercy of something impossibly beyond an individual scope, the fragility of companionship… Instead I felt almost detached. The scope presented by the choices at each decision-making point is quite narrow, where one is presented as moving the story forward, as a yes/no decision rather than one between two interesting potential paths.

This game is built on a platform called Plotopolis, where you progress by typing keywords. It behaves like a choice-based game, despite the appearance of a parser, and does not accept what should be synonyms.

I recall similar chat-like software used in choice-based stories in previous years. I presume this is meant to make IF more accessible to people used to chat interfaces. I do wonder how much the IF-naive person interacts with a chat interface expecting prose and narrative, though, compared to how they approach games (a framework and premise; expectations on how the player interacts with the game; a reward for a skill performed correctly or interaction in the “correct” way).

The Whale’s Keeper had potential, but I fear it failed to hit the right notes for me.

play time: 15-20 mins

The reader plays the last remaining priest devoted to an unnamed being, whose worship takes the form of daily ritual.

Loneliness and duty run through the story: this priest houses not-quite-human children, and they too make up part of the priest's daily duties. While there may be loneliness in unanswered prayer, there is, ultimately, solace and a kind of community in this sort of care. And if a religion lives only with belief (deity is an entirely different matter), then the player/character holds existential power.

The overall aesthetic, both in writing and visual design, is appropriately gloomy and formal. There are subtle nods to a deeper backstory, but the focus still lies squarely on the earthly: the priest, the children, the physical setting.

Different levels of choice are made transparent to the reader with the text formatting to indicate its importance in the narrative's progress. The story has shallow branching which converges in a suitably ambiguous ending, as befits a deity which may or may not exist - whose existence may, in fact, depend on the player's choices.

A grieving narrator finds a letter with a secret. Playthrough: 10-15 mins

This short game had the cadence of song lyrics, and I found Texture a good fit for the story: I ended up reading the verb (which, in Texture, you drag to the relevant word in the prose) like a sort of chorus.

The loss is depicted as historic, yet the narrator’s feelings are raw, unaddressed, difficult to disclose to others. That gave the developing story a creeping horror(Spoiler - click to show), one which can be read as literal or metaphysical.

I have only minor gripes related to the aesthetics of the platform itself - I wish Texture would display the text at the same size regardless of the amount of text on screen, and so could be more legible. But this is no fault of the author, and I’m not inclined to attribute it to pacing.

A commendable use of this particular platform to tell a story about an unresolved, malignant grief.

You are a fugitive, running through the woods in search of safety.

A highly branching but short story - I reached an ending in about 15 minutes.

I came up against a number of technical issues: I found the text hard to see against the background, and there were a couple of typos.

An inconsistent tone undermined the game’s mood. This was both in the dialogue and environment descriptions - contrasting with both the internal monologues and the theme. Also, I always expect any customisation options to play an important role in shaping the character, however these had minimal effect on the story.

While the core themes were promising, they felt underdeveloped. Themes of identity and the “us vs them” of humanity vs monsterhood all have great potential - with more focus on the narrator's developing self and how it interacts with other characters, it could definitely form a more focused story.

CWs as given in the starting screen: violence, implied murder, and implied animal cruelty

You are assistant to baker Benoit in this small town, and your first day coincides with the Saving Day Festival. What better chance to get to know your neighbours?

The small town with secrets is a well-worn trope of interactive fiction. Different authors and games handle it differently, and in this case this dark side is given a relatively light touch for most of the game. There is signposting throughout the story where the choices get more explicitly horrifying, which I found was a nice tone adjuster

What Let Them Eat Cake did really well was establishing the discomfiting experience of intruding on a close-knit community. Even with nothing explicit going wrong, there is enough awkwardness in the narrator’s interactions with other townsfolk, reaching a satisfying ending in the conclusion when the core secret is revealed.

The game is a good length to replay to try and get another ending as well, or to uncover more about the neighbours. No flashy implementation or mechanical tricks here, but solid storyline, good handling of the themes and enough detail in key characters to be intriguing.

CW: gore, violence

You, the narrator, are the monster under the bridge. Prowling in the night to catch unwary travellers.

There is gore; the narrator is a man-eating monster, after all, but the prose reads almost a nature documentary - not revelling in the gore, but framing it as a necessity.

Little bells and whistles: simple text effects which some might find distracting; hand-drawn illustrations which I quite enjoyed.

This story had clear branching and multiple endings which encourages replay, some endings more unexpected than others.