Ratings and 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.