Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

This game reminded me strongly of porpentine's Ruinness, with its multiple protagonists and deliberate strangeness. Like porpentine's worlds, institutions are mostly faceless, cruel, unsentimental; mystic symbolism is commonplace; place details are but sketched out.

Here, you attempt to stop the end of days. There's no narrative conflict more often thrown around: after all, what bigger stakes could there be besides the end of the world?

Heretic Pride's view of the apocalypse is intimate, gentle. There is less of dramatic world-saving, more conversation. Who do you miss, one character asks. How was your childhood. Heretic Pride is a phlegmatic/melancholic read, with a focus on building a spare, gentle mood.

Time to completion: 15-20 minutes

[This game describes an abusive and violent relationship.]

The key conceit of this game is that the more rooms you escape, the more abilities you gain. This is an interesting play on the idea of restricted actions. Your powers parallel what you know about yourself and the thing that brought you here in the first place.

The rest of the game is thinly implemented. There are some rooms with poorly disambiguated nouns. The choice of verbs and the implementation thereof sometimes feels clunky. There are built-in walkthroughs for individual rooms which make this much less painful, though I found myself relying on them more often than I should have.

The game overall is buoyed by its underlying story and its unreliable narrator. The reveal of the story feels satisfying and the journal tied things together - some might find it contrived, but I felt it worked.

In any case, the changing verb set is thematically appropriate, never mind that the puzzles could be frustrating at times.

Time to completion: 10-15 minutes (your mileage may vary)

Three cycles since fecundation. The pharates can taste our thoughts. Their pupal minds yearn for mothers' milk.

You are sending commands to a parasitic, insectile entity, and there are a number of steps it must complete before it can successfully parasitise the host. Your task, then, is to figure out the correct order for the steps.

The puzzle is aided by informative failure messages, but even then, I took many turns to figure out a vaguely correct sequence. There is no question of error.

The writing in this game is deliberately wielded as well: the language is florid, like that favoured by Lovecraft, but terse; a tally of the casualties (or the pharates you fail to guide to eclosion) reminds you of the consequences of your clumsiness. This is body horror the way I like it.

Time to completion: 45 mins - 1 hour

One of the top-rated games on textadventures.co.uk, Victorian Detective has you take on the persona of a distinctly Sherlockian police detective to solve a murder.

The structure of the game is, intentionally or not, very similar to the Conan Doyle stories, in that the titular detective makes an impressive but slightly far-fetched inference about some tiny observation, which determines the entire course of the investigation. Victorian Detective rewards detailed reading by carefully firing Chekhov's guns, even if the clues given are sometimes frankly esoteric (Spoiler - click to show)(I don't know, but can you identify the smell of haddock compared to other fish? This isn't Toby's Nose!).

Although this game predates Toby's Nose, the way both games get the reader to come to their own conclusions is quite similar, and indeed constructing a web of clues for the reader to pick apart is no mean feat.

This game is relatively well thought out. Occasional illustrations add a whimsical tone to the story, and in at least one point serves as a plot point. Not the most solid mystery, but mildly entertaining.

stone is a love (?) letter to a close friend, who is an aromantic student. Their incapability of infatuation and romantic love is viewed, in this world, as a sign of illness - of a stone heart, so to speak.

This is a work of interactive poetry, and in many respects is highly atypical. The kerning is uneven; the tone, conversational. The relationship between the two main characters is clothed in a magical setting where students build bestiaries and have to pass evoking exams. It is fitting, then, that the NPC's inability to feel romantic love is compared to a pathological calcification of the soul.

stone is affectionate, intimate, reassuring. The world building reminded me of Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, with its mix of sci-fi and high fantasy. stone, however, is almost its opposite. While Swanwick's novel heavily features sexual energy as a source of power, stone's magicians need not experience sexual attraction. The Iron Dragon's Daughter features an unforgiving, gritty world; stone depicts a tender, intimate moment between two friends. Recommended.

Light My Way Home is a contemplative Shufflecomp entry set by a hydro corridor, and the landscape is unlikely: metal towers, scrabbly grass, abandoned barns. But in the midst of this comes a simple, lovely story of longing and loss.

Light My Way Home is a lovely sensory experience. The location descriptions are evocative; it features a quiet soundtrack punctuated by the chirping of crickets. This game revolves around a special command, >POWER OBJECT, which allows you to change the environment around you to guide the one NPC and, in so doing, find out more about yourself.