Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

You are a Fabricationist, and you are the last of your kind. And now, you have awoken from your centuries-long slumber… and you have a visitor.

This game looks and sounds beautiful. Its soundscape is vaguely industrial, all hollow metal booms and gratings and the squeal of an untuned radio; the backgrounds are swimming watercolours.

This post-apocalyptic salvation story has an emotional heft that transcends the usual stakes implied by a post-apocalyptic story (the loss of life as we know it), thanks to the interactions - the give and take, really - between the narrator and an unexpected companion. Alone, who would have mourned the Fabricationist’s passing, or celebrate his achievement?

This remains one of my favourite games, for its message of hope in the midst of apocalypse is sorely needed these days.

As the title suggests, this game is about Emma, a generically-named child of a rich family. Her sole defining characteristic is that she's a "trust fund baby", a tycoon's daughter. What she would be called in Chinese can be literally translated as "thousand pieces of gold".

For all that, the game feels colourless, populated as it is with stock phrases and characters. Emma herself has barely any background and a scant personality; she might as well be a machine. The writing is relentlessly expository, sometimes going to the extent of explaining common phrases. Even the conflicts and seamy underbelly of Emma's surroundings are neatly summarised.

It doesn't quite read as a satire. It reads more like one of those TV serials - the type that goes on for two hundred episodes, which makes you painfully aware of the actors trying to show you that they're angry, but never quite succeeding.

It doesn't help that this game is almost entirely linear, despite the fact that Emma’s extraordinary privilege gives her an unusual amount of choice of what she could do with her life. Even the choices play on gross stereotypes instead of investing the player in Emma's development. There is little sense of development, growth or humanity… and whether or not that’s part of the point is up to you, dear reader, to decide.

[Time to completion: 5-10 minutes]

This game uses Google Forms, and why not? It sets up your own website for you, it allows you to make choices in various ways, it even can display text conditionally. It’s a blunt tool, obviously not suited for the task, but it… kinda works?

It is primarily dialogue-focused, taking on the feeling of an interrogation, an interrogation one who has brought on some unnamed catastrophe on the city. There is gentle, devastating rhythm in the prose.

All Your Time-Tossed Selves explores the various ways there are to make choices, with a little surprise at the end.

You’re exploring a nuclear shelter - alone - on a dare. It’s not entirely clear what era this is set in, but it’s almost unnecessary, partly because the threat of powerful men doing rash things is ever present, partly because I suspect that was the intention - what matters is that nuclear shelters are a thing of the past, decommissioned, relics, ancient… but safe? Are they safe?

It’s hard to describe this without spoiling it, because the twist is one of the main things that holds this game together. Cutting out the spoilers makes it a very short piece of text, so I’d say you could safely go off, play it - it’s not long - and come back. I’ll wait. Minuteman is a bit of a mood piece, a piece of dynamic fiction, because of its linearity. It is more a relived memory than an adventure. I couldn’t quite follow the logic of the thing, but I certainly caught the mood, and its brevity gives it the intensity of a fever dream.

(Spoiler - click to show)By your actions - born of ignorance, but that is no excuse - you doom a whole town. You never see the havoc you wreak directly, but only ever observe it from a position of relative safety, which adds to the feeling of feverish detachment - like those dreams where you see disaster coming, but cannot move a muscle, cannot say a word. Text effects transform the piece from passive interaction with a static, dead place to one bristling with imminent threat, and while I don’t usually appreciate Harlowe’s default text effects, here I imagined them as different voices in a spoken performance.

An Ectocomp game with the name of what is usually a joyous occasion is quite the juxtaposition. In this short game, you are preparing for your wedding day, and everything about the preamble suggests reluctance, hesitance; it is immediately clear that this is no consensual union. The wedding is a matter of practicality, as many are, and this affair was the best you were going to get.

The author’s light touch with world-building is not unlike watching a theatre backdrop: sketched out with just enough details for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Of course, this treads the line between minimalism and under-implementation, and one might argue for the description of this or that.

Like The Unstoppable Vengeance of Doctor Bonesaw (to compare ECTOCOMP to ECTOCOMP), Wedding Day seems at first to have a single path laid out, waiting for you to walk it. But the parser effectively masks the second ending hinted at in the ABOUT text, which gave it satisfying depth for a game with a carefully limited scope.

You're on the train to meet your family for the weekend, and the thought fills you with dread.

The cover suggests a cutesy story aimed at younger readers; the blurb suggests something deeper, with a hint of unhappy family life.

Vague allusions to emotional baggage (at least in the branches that I played through) and a mundane beginning taps on a common urge in IF, though not necessarily the most attention-grabbing. Infrequent binary choices are sprinkled in the midst of linear text. The sheer amount of linearity actually hides the broad branching, and players might be put off from replaying by the verbosity. Conciseness would have helped this game, but at least one of the branches is weird enough to warrant all this.

Off the Rails has some good ideas, but could be more compellingly presented.

“Partial” may be in its title, but its length is pretty much unknowable. Links nest in links, and upon replaying, one is likely to find something completely new, suggesting a cobwebby tangle of links from idea to idea.

A short, easily overlooked interactive, more meditative practice than game.

Black Marker is a game about censorship in an authoritarian regime. In this case, though, the redaction masks a mystery, and you can choose the types of information to censor.

This game is not the first of its kind. Other notable examples include Blackbar and Redactor. In Blackbar, you have to guess the redactor word - you play an anti-censor, where you must create meaning from what was eradicated by government censors. Redactor is probably closest in implementation, but with the added pressure of a time limit. Black Marker, however, grounds the material in its own universe, with a coherent storyline across pieces of material.

Select one piece of information, and all the phrases in the passage relating to that piece of information will be censored for you. The game penalises both censoring too much or too little, and so requires a little more thought than just clicking phrases at random. Where the game could have been stronger, though, is the emotional heart - the player character is little more than a faceless actor, and having some in-universe intrinsic motivation to do one’s job - or not do one’s job - would have heightened the tension in Black Marker.

This is a Twiny Jam game (hence, a short Twine) in which you are a mermaid - think sirens. But instead of luring sailors to their death for seduction’s sake, you’re doing it for your sister and your survival.

This game casts the sirens’ song as performative: born not out of a desire to seduce, but of necessity. Each attempt to lure a ship to its doom is built on the backs of your sisters. No one can win: either they die, or you perish.

Although tiny, little mermaids reveals just enough about the universe to form a thought-provoking retelling of the mythology surrounding sirens.