Reviews by Draconis

I’m really not sure what to make of this one. My first thought was that it was a parody, but now I think it’s deeply, purely sincere. And I mean that in a good way.

This feels like a kid’s first experiment with Inform 7, and it has a certain charm to it. You are Reg, the Good Werewolf, and you need to punch 100-foot-tall undead gorillas and dancing skeletons into space on your way to free the good fairies from the bad fairy. It even has a handful of AI-generated illustrations!

Looking at others’ reviews, Encorm mentions “this was at least partially written by a seven-year-old”, which explains a lot. It definitely reminds me of my first attempts to make an Inform 7 game, and honestly, ECTOCOMP does seem like a good way to get outside eyes on a first experiment like this.

I wouldn’t call this a good game, necessarily, but it has a very distinct charm and soul to it. I hope the authors continue to play around with Inform and look forward to seeing what else they create.

As the author explains on the main page:

This is a study in stateful media with an emphasis on narration-based agency. To avoid breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief, this work eschews story-based agency.

What’s this mean for you? An interactive fiction experience that is more “literary” and less “game” made by combining quintessential elements of parser-based, choice-based, chat-based, and templated-based works under a new theory of agency in stateful media.

In other words, this is an experiment, intended to explore a new style of interactive fiction. Rather than giving the player any influence over the story (which risks “breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief”), they’re allowed to choose which word is used for certain descriptions—changing the way the story is described to the audience.

It’s an interesting idea, and indeed the same basic story told from different perspectives could give an entirely different result. But after that grand, artistic description, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the work itself.

As best I can tell, it’s a short story published by Charles Henkle in 1916. One noun has been deleted from this story, and the player is encouraged to fill in the blank. The following paragraph changes depending if a positive or negative word is used.

The problem is, this one noun—and the following paragraph—doesn’t really have much impact on the narrative. It shows us what one character thinks of another character for a brief moment, and that’s it. It was a good, well-written short story, but it certainly didn’t seem like I had much agency over the narrative at all. My personal thoughts on the character aren’t any different than if I had just read this short story in a paper-and-ink anthology, and the narration’s viewpoint on him isn’t really either: would the experience have been much different if the author had just omitted that character’s thoughts completely, letting the reader fill in the blanks in their mind?

While I liked Henkle’s writing, and I’m glad to see people pushing the bounds of the medium and testing new types of “agency”, the interactive parts of this work just didn’t really work for me. To put it bluntly, it just didn’t feel different from reading a non-interactive short story, any more than a “click to turn the page” prompt would change the fundamental experience of a book. I do look forward to seeing further experiments in this vein, and what “narrative agency” will look like once the concept has been further developed.

I would also like to invite comparison with Something Blue, a game from the same ECTOCOMP that gives the player a similar degree of agency. It's told through a series of letters, and all you can do in the game is edit certain passages, changing the tone of what you're conveying. Yet it ends up feeling significantly more satisfying than Restitution did. Is it because of the story-based agency in the ending? Or simply because the interactive and non-interactive parts mesh together seamlessly, and it gives the player so much more authority over the story's tone?

This is a very short (less-than-five-minute) choice-based game that’s exactly what it says on the tin. You’re a zombie who just ate someone’s brain, and you’re reviewing the experience on Yelp.

The frame narrative is neat. You’re choosing the course of the story as you narrate it to your online audience, explaining-and-deciding how exactly you caught this person and ate his brains.

Unfortunately, the overall experience just felt lacking. It was a nice short game, but it didn’t feel complete the way the similarly-short Zombie Eye did—I was left feeling like I hadn’t really done anything, and the game hadn’t really said anything to me. This is quite reasonable for a Petite Mort, though, and the writing of the review works; if I had more experience with Yelp, the parody might have hit harder.

This is a wordplay-based puzzle game, in the tradition of Nord and Bert and Ad Verbum—the sort of thing that really depends on the parser format to work. The world of the game is truly made of words and sentences, not just described by them. I know Andrew Schultz was writing these when I first went on hiatus from the forum, and I’m glad to see he hasn’t stopped.

This one is based on alliterative pairs of words, which have to rhyme with the thing you want to affect. For example (made up, not from this game), you could defend yourself from horrible monsters in a SHIP SHACK by hitting them with the command WHIP WHACK. (Others may be more familiar with this series than I am, because it does seem to be a series, but I’ve never seen it before this ECTOCOMP, so it’s all new to me!)

The puzzles here are fun, and there were some very nice “aha!” moments: getting the ammunition felt great. The big issue with this game is one that might not be avoidable in a Petite Mort—the unrecognized commands.

There are just so many possible alliterative rhymes. And with only four hours to implement, the majority of them aren’t recognized. This means the pacing frequently gets ruined by a long span of perfectly good commands that the game doesn’t understand. There’s no in-game reason why SHARE SHOWS and TEAR TOES aren’t valid rhymes for RARE ROWS, except that there wasn’t time to implement them all. (I’m especially disappointed about FAVE FOUND and SPAM SPEAK. Those felt like they should even fit the puzzles!)

Like I said, I’m not sure this is something that can really be fixed in a Petite Mort. The number of puzzles is very good. I just wish I didn’t keep losing my momentum.

Another stark tonal shift! This is a parody of workplace safety training, meant to ensure that employees know how to properly use and operate an HSL (haunted scissor lift). It consists of a 35-question quiz implemented in ChoiceScript and a manual containing the answers.

Putting the bulk of the information in the manual is a great way to get around the four-hour limit for Petite Mort, and I think it worked well here. The gameplay involves trying to find the relevant information to answer each question, and in the process enjoying the parody of both instruction manuals and safety tests. As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a big fan of the more lighthearted ECTOCOMP games, and this one definitely qualifies.

Excellent design to take advantage of ECTOCOMP rules (since supplemental materials aren’t covered by the four-hour limitation), excellent parody writing, and a solid implementation (the quiz format really helps). I like it.

…dear lord.

I’m not sure how to describe this one. It’s a choice-based work from the perspective of a serial(?) killer and their latest victim, told in a half-religious half-erotic tone. The victim wants to be martyred. The killer wants to do it right. Do it wrong, fail to carry out the right process or let them die before it’s done, and the game is lost. Martyrdom must be done properly. If it is, the victim’s last moans are “thank you!” two thousand and fifty two times over.

It’s horrifying. I never want to touch it again. As another ECTOCOMP reviewer said, that’s a sign of a good horror game. It’s a short little work that’s deeply unsettling, and I want it as far away from me as possible. I’m not sure what it is about the writing that gets to me in this way, but it does.

The opening sequence conveys two crucial things. One, this looks like an Inform game (Parchment’s classic font and color scheme). And two, the horror is going to hit close to home. “You just let year after year pass…” is one of my greatest fears. So we’re off to a great start.

The game is short and sweet. You’re in the bathroom preparing for your first job interview in decades, reflecting on your life, and trying to cover up this huge zit before you go out in public. Your main options are calling the various contacts in your cell phone and trying to cover it up with the materials at hand. The game ends when you finally feel ready to face the world.

There are two different endings (that I found), and the implementation is quite solid for a Petite Mort game. More importantly, though, this game does a great job of using the illusion of interactivity to emphasize the exact opposite. A parser game offers you the opportunity to do anything in the world and that just shows how few options you really have. The cell phone that connects you to the rest of the world actually underscores your isolation from it. It’s a great way to avoid the combinatorial explosion of a vast, fully-implemented world (bathrooms being infamously difficult to implement in parser games) and also to use the fundamental nature of the medium to emphasize the story being told. And then in the end, you do, in fact, still have the power to determine the ending. The overall effect is quite nice.

A much more lighthearted choice-based game. You’re Lyra, you’re hosting a high school party, an Entity is going to attack in two hours, and if you want to stand a chance against it you need allies. Already I’m delighted by the premise. (To probably no-one’s surprise, this is one of my favorite genres of Halloween spooky.)

The plot is relatively straightforward. Talk to your friends at the party. Convince as many of them as possible to help you. Then fight the entity when it shows up. The first part is a mix of classic choice-based dialogue (choose what you say) and “world-establishing choices”; I’m sure there’s a better word for this, but the choices that define facts about the world rather than your character’s actions, like collaborative worldbuilding in a tabletop game (or the first chapter of a Choice of Games work). You talk to your brother, and the first choice is how positive or negative your relationship currently is—and while having it be negative is probably a bad tactical decision, it seemed like the more interesting story, so I had to take that one. In other words, the start was exciting enough that I was more interested in adding drama to the story than winning the fight, which is a commendation.

Then you fight the entity in a little turn-based system. You can tell your allies to attack or defend in various ways as you try to hurt the entity and it tries to hurt you. This was the weakest part of the game, and I couldn’t really tell what was working and what wasn’t—defensive actions got no response at all, while the aggressive ones mostly seemed to all do the same thing, so I just rotated through me and my allies attacking and stopped worrying about our own health.

While the combat itself was a bit of a letdown (and, to be fair, implementing an engaging tactical combat system in a Petite Mort game is an enormous task), I had a lot of fun trying to figure out the details of this world and my character’s past, driving the dialogue in directions that would lead to flashback scenes. Reminisce with my (ex?) boyfriend and the flashback to our first date establishes that (Spoiler - click to show)nobody in this world has ever seen the stars; let my friend talk about the book series she’s obsessed with and she mentions in passing that (Spoiler - click to show)writings from the old world were preserved through DNA storage. A Petite Mort game is really the perfect medium for hinting at a world without explaining any of it, and I’m now replaying to see how many other tidbits I can uncover.

This is my favorite one so far, and I’m very curious if the author intends to write (or has written?) anything else in this setting, or wants to leave it a mystery for the ages.

A choice-based piece, written in Ink, based around a conversation between a psychologist and a patient (set in I think the USSR?). I say “piece” instead of “game” because the focus was very much on the story and the writing rather than the playing. There are choices to make, but with the feeling of not very much choice to them—both because you’re constrained by your role, and because your patient often doesn’t really care what you have to say.

That writing, then, is excellent. The patient’s descriptions got a visceral reaction in some places and the twist at the end was very effective—if there were indications of it earlier, I certainly didn’t notice them. It read like a very solid short story, interactive or not. The first time through I thought my choices didn’t really matter and any other sequence of choices would have led to the same ending; then I went through again and it finished differently. (Now if only I could choose not to bring up Oksana…)

My biggest issue with it is typographical. It’s a weird thing to criticize in a Petite Mort game, but the whole story is told through this conversation, and I was sometimes confused about who was talking and what was dialogue versus action. Quotation marks were sometimes there and sometimes not: “let the silence sit” was (as far as I can tell) an action for my character to take, and please, carry on was a line for my character to say. Some sort of indication of who each line belonged to would help.

Overall, though, the writing is very solid, way more so than I expected in a four-hour game. Whatever the typography may be, I’d have to recommend it on that point alone. And even if this brand of psychological horror isn’t my usual jam, the way I reacted to the writing shows that it’s succeeding at what it’s trying to do. Very well done.

The first one the randomizer gave me is actually one I tested: a short (5-minute) parser game about dealing with the eponymous Zombie Eye in a dimly-lit London Underground station. The pixel-art graphics are very fitting, and I’m not sure if this is the default look for Adventuron games or a stylistic choice by the author, but the bright colors and monospace font give it a retro look that I really liked. I was told during testing that the game restarting every time it ends is a standard part of Adventuron too, but this game made it part of the story, and I always love it when games make use of features of the medium like that.

Without spoiling anything, I liked the plot, and liked how it tied in to the puzzles. This is a very short game, but in that space it tells the story it wants to tell, and the implementation is solid. I did run into a few guess-the-verb difficulties, but the author provided a verb list and a walkthrough for exactly that purpose.

I do have two main criticisms. First is that it’s a bit too short; I would have liked a bit more puzzling before the final reveal, but I’m also not sure how I would have worked that into the story. Second, given how few puzzles there are, a more detailed implementation of those puzzles would have been nice, with more responses to incorrect approaches. But all in all this is just what I’m looking for in a Petite Mort game: short, sweet, and spooky.