Reviews by Draconis

Wrapping this year's reviews with one more murder mystery! This is another one in the vein of The Killings in Wasacona: you have a limited amount of time to solve the case, important actions all consume fractions of this time, and the clock controls various opportunities (e.g. a character might only be available in the evening, since she's asleep in the mornings). It's also a choice-based Twine piece.

Winter-Over, though, crosses this with a classic closed circle scenario: a murder occurred among the staff of an Antarctic research station in the middle of polar winter, and nobody will be able to enter or leave for ten days. Which means the killer must have been one of your coworkers…and until you can find and confront them, you're locked in with them, with no means of escape. The game is named after the "winter-over syndrome" that affects people wintering over in the research bases, which is definitely getting to the protagonist as the game progresses—managing your levels of stress is vital, and all the descriptions of rooms and characters in the game change as you become stressed, becoming increasingly paranoid.

The atmosphere is excellent, but I admit I struggled with the interface. The majority of the gameplay involves exploring the station, figuring out which people will be at which places at which times, and asking them questions. Questioning one person might unlock new dialogue with another—if Alice says her alibi was playing board games with Bob, then you can go talk to Bob to confirm or deny it, and then potentially go back to Alice to push her on the contradiction—and a convenient NOTES tab automatically keeps track of what you've learned about everyone's schedule.

Another part of the gameplay, though, involves doing various tasks (gardening, dishes, etc) with people to reduce your stress and improve your relationship with them. The better your relationship is, the more they'll tell you. But I got hopelessly stuck on this part for a while, because I thought I needed to find the appropriate NPC in the appropriate room for it—you don't, if you choose to do dishes, you can summon any NPC from anywhere in the station to do them with you, instead of only the one in the cafeteria.

(On the interface side, I also didn't love how often the game presented text one paragraph at a time with a "click to continue" link, instead of an actual choice or a full page of text to read. But that's not uncommon in Twine, it's just not my style, so I can't dock points for that.)

Once I figured out the interface, I quickly ruled out all but one of the suspects. But I kept searching, since I didn't have a motive, and I wasn't sure if the rest of the staff would accept my logic without one—and thus gave the killer the chance to try to silence me! Maybe I could have ended the case a few days earlier, but having that uncertainty, and getting attacked for it, was a high point. It felt like it was happening because of how I was playing the character, rather than just being scripted (even though, of course, it was), and immersed me well in the situation.

I also found the two twists (what (Spoiler - click to show)Victor was up to and what (Spoiler - click to show)Bob was up to) excellent, and it ended the story on a very high note. The ambience, and how it changed with my stress level, was great, and the logistical management was very fun. There are just a few things I wish had been different:
- I wish the stress-reducing activities tied into the logistics of the station more, instead of being able to summon NPCs anywhere at any time; this would probably need more activities in different rooms, but it would also play up that stress gets worse when you're alone
- The days and nights kind of blurred together, which I'm sure is intentional, but also meant I quickly lost track of how many days I had left; adding something like "three days until the authorities arrive" to the date display would have helped that, since I have no idea if I finished with one day left or with five (I very quickly forgot which date the deadline was)

Overall, though, a very fun mystery, and a good note to end on!

Big, unapologetic, lovingly-made tribute to the Enchanter games? Sign me up! There was basically no chance that I would actually dislike this game, and it delivered all the things I expected: bizarrely-specific spells and potions, magical solutions to mundane problems, weird contraptions with no apparent purpose, and a climactic battle against an evil being. I'm even going to indulge my own pride a bit and interpret some aspects as Scroll Thief references even if they probably aren't (a rule against first-year students using GNUSTO, an invisible barrier that stops you from carrying books out of the room, restrictions being put on teleportation spells to stop you from telefragging yourself or others).

So before I continue on with the review, please understand that my overall impression was very positive. I had a lot of fun with this game. The flavor and writing were very much on-point for the "Zorkian" aesthetic. And the abandoned shopping mall is a classic way to throw a bunch of puzzles together; it reminded me of Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which also used that setting to great effect. I laughed out loud at the moment that uses Inform's default parser responses to comedic effect:

> The noogle spell (dress the target in an outfit perfect for his or her personality).
>
> > remove towel
> (first closing the room door)
> You take off the fluffy pink towel.
>
> > noogle me
> POOF! You are surrounded by a cloud of pink smoke. When it dissipates, you find that you are wearing the perfect outfit!
>
> > x outfit
> Which do you mean, the orange high tops, the yellow leggings, the pink shorts or the oversized T-shirt?

My main criticisms come in a couple different varieties. First, the polish issues: places where there are fun, sensible puzzles, but the implementation makes them less fun than they could be. Missing synonyms (a ROUND KNOB allows X KNOB but not X ROUND), overall lack of cluing (when seeing a gold circle, why would my first instinct be (Spoiler - click to show)PUT CIRCLE ON WALL to make a rectangle?), and sometimes just a general fiddliness that doesn't work well with the parser model (in one specific case, you have to RUN NORTH to beat a time limit when just NORTH isn't enough; anywhere else, even when under an even stricter time limit, RUN NORTH says you're in no hurry). I think another round or two of testing would have smoothed these all away, and the experience would have been better for it.

(Also in this category is "it wasn't a bug but it would have been nice" features. In the opening segment, a key NPC won't appear until you have all the equipment you need, but I didn't know what I was missing and had to wander the map randomly until I realized I hadn't examined a particular closet. A mention of what exactly I was missing would have helped. And a lot of things had limits on them that felt kind of artificial. Why does the DYSMU potion only have four doses? Is there really any difference, gameplay-wise, between "I messed up that sequence, I'll try again" and "I messed up that sequence, I'll restore and try again", except forcing the player to save often?)

Second, the map felt enormous, which sometimes served a purpose and sometimes didn't—do we really need four rooms with almost identical descriptions to express that this bridge is really long? In the main body of the game, there are tons of puzzles you can access immediately, but many of them can't be solved until you have items or spells from other areas. I think a bit more gating would have helped with this: puzzles that block off a whole section of the map until solved, instead of just giving you an item to apply elsewhere.

And third, is a problem that showed up a lot in the original Zork and Enchanter trilogies.

There come times when an author has clearly come up with a really awesome idea for a puzzle, where you need to take these specific steps to solve it. The machine room in Enchanter, the coal mine in Sorcerer, the featureless plain and treasure vault in Spellbreaker. They have a vision in their head of how the puzzle should play out, and all they have to do is guide the player along that path. This game had a few of these, most notably the strange machine in JCZorkmid.

Except, something else in the game would get in the way of that. So they add reasons you can't use that thing. The key moment of the coal mine in Sorcerer is using time travel and giving your spellbook to your alternate self.
- What if the player just drops the book to pick up later? Well, anything dropped in the coal mine is lost forever.
- What if they throw the book into the next room? There's a lake there, if you throw the spellbook it gets soaked and ruined.
- What if they memorize all the spells they need before doing this puzzle? Well you see the VILSTU potion has an odd side effect that erases all spells you've memorized when it wears off.

And so on and so on. And the problem is, it tends to become much more satisfying for the designer than the player, because the player can't solve the puzzle using their knowledge of how the world works—if they try to use their knowledge from elsewhere, diabolus ex machina stops them.

For an example from this game, there's a segment where you lose all your clothes, and can't continue until you can preserve your modesty somehow. Early on in the game, you learned a "magically create clothes" spell…but that's not the intended solution here, so the device that puts you in this segment also erases all your known spells and takes away your spell book, and you have to memorize them again afterward.

Now, restrictions like this aren't always a bad thing. The way the game keeps you from using the time travel spell in different places (the temporal rune) is brilliant and makes sense, and lets you learn the rule and then figure out how to use it. But some puzzles, like the strange machine, really didn't work for me, because it felt like it wasn't testing my ability to use the tools I was given—it was testing my ability to guess which specific solution the developer had in mind.

All in all, this game had a lot in common with BOSH. It was a big, sprawling puzzlefest with fantasy elements that didn't take itself too seriously but was also deeply, enjoyably earnest about it…and it could have crossed the line from "fun" to "amazing" if it just had a bit more polish, and maybe refactored a few of the trickier puzzles. I hope it gets that little bit more polish after the competition, and I look forward to what the implementor does next!

You are government agent Larch Faraji (they/them) of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, tasked with investigating aliens, ghosts, and other potentially paranormal goings-on and keeping the citizens of the United States safe from all manner of horrible things. And you'll get to that just as soon as you can answer your phone. You see, budget cuts have forced the Bureau out of its nice, cushy Washington DC headquarters into a hastily-converted department store on the edge of a swamp in Maryland. And the Bureau's new secretary has managed to lock your new phone inside your new desk, and the hex key has fallen down an air vent, and your boss is more interested in sixteenth-century alchemists than here-and-now logistics, and…

Structure-wise, this is an Inform parser game with some interesting quirks (the narration is entirely third-person, for example, and room headings are integrated into the descriptions), which is structured as a bureaucratic farce that quickly turns into lighthearted occult-horror pastiche. I'm pretty sure at least parts of it are riffing on The X-Files, which unfortunately I've never seen. It wears its colors on its sleeve, starting out with a very solid bout of participatory comedy—where the jokes are funnier because the game is making you an active part of them instead of just telling them to you—involving trying to answer that damn phone, which quickly leads you into a tunnel to four-dimensional hyperspace in order to access the abandoned laundromat next door.

It's a long game; I barely finished within the two hours allotted, with ample use of the built-in adaptive hints and David Welbourn's excellent walkthrough. And overall, I very much enjoyed it! My big complaint is that it's a game with a lot of potential, and I wish it had gotten more polish to let that potential show through.

For example, there were some truly excellent puzzles hampered by (in my opinion) just a little bit too much obscurity. I loved the puzzle involving a strange way of encoding numbers on a map (well, "map"), for example, and would have loved to solve it entirely myself, but the fact that the key clue says "love is all you need" instead of "you need to get to zero" (relying on the player's knowledge of tennis scoring, and—more importantly—the player connecting this clue to tennis in the first place) sent me to the hints. An important widget is hidden behind a tapestry, but there's no cue that you need to MOVE TAPESTRY to find it, and variants like TAKE TAPESTRY have (custom!) messages saying it shouldn't be moved.

The polish gets thinner and thinner as the game approaches its end, until when you finally have the vitally-important screwdriver to retrieve the vitally-important hex key, this happens:

> \> unscrew vent
> It is fixed in place.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.
>
> \> open vent
> Faraji unscrews the four screws and removes the vent cover. They take the hex wrench from inside and put the cover back on.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.

And with one particular hidden easter egg (which I won't spoil here), I'd figured out exactly what had to be done, but wasn't able to make the parser accept it until I resorted to emailing the author for help with the syntax.

I enjoyed this game a lot, and I think it's solidly done, with a great tone and very enjoyable puzzles. I just wish it had been given more time for testing and polishing, to keep little obstacles like this from getting in the player's way—because I would have enjoyed it even more if I didn't have to keep returning to the hints and/or walkthrough.

It should surprise nobody that I'm playing the murder mysteries first, but this one feels nicely different from the rest in a way that makes a good change of pace. It's more "police procedural" than "whodunit novel"; you're a rookie FBI agent sent out on your first case, to find the truth behind a series of murders in a small American town.

The overall gameplay consists of driving around the town, trying to budget your time appropriately as you interview suspects, investigate crime scenes, and search for clues. Further events unfold at particular times, so it's important to watch the clock—the university president is only available in the mornings and afternoons, not the evenings, for example, so you might lose your chance to talk to her before the killer strikes again. This is a model that, to nobody's surprise, I think is very effective, and the graphical map (green circles for places you can visit, black circles for places you've exhausted all the options from) helps a lot in keeping it from feeling like a tedious list to lawnmower through. It makes Wasacona feel more like a town and less like a bulleted list.

The gameplay within scenes is somewhat different. Your character has five stats, chosen at the beginning of the game: Perception (finding clues), Academics (interpreting clues), Physical (moving around), Intimidation (getting information from suspects), and Intuition (reading people and detecting lies). They have to add up to zero, so I played as an "Analyst": Perception +3, Academics +6, Physical -6, Intimidation -6, Intuition +3.

Clues to the mystery tend to be gated behind one or more of these skills. When this happens, you roll a virtual d20, add your stat, and see if you got an 11 or above. Sometimes you need several rolls in a row to get a result—for example, you might need Perception to find footprints, Academics to identify the type of shoe, and Intimidation to get access to a suspect's shoe to compare it against—and this added an interesting tension to the investigation. You always know when there's something to be found, but your character didn't find it, which adds an interesting tone to things.

(Notably, getting information from suspects is always Intimidation; the killer is still out there and still killing, so you don't have time to get a warrant to access information the legal way. Your only recourse is to browbeat suspects until they let something slip, and whether you succeed or fail, they'll never talk to you again after that. It definitely gives the game a particular tone.)

I enjoyed my runthrough—and convicted the killer in three of the four murders—but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if I wasn't an Analyst. I only found two Physical checks in the entire game, for example, while Perception came up constantly. In the last murder ((Spoiler - click to show)Leroy Jameson), I failed an Academics roll early on, after which I never had a chance to get any more evidence about him, so I'm left with an impression that I could very well have gotten screwed by the dice out of finding evidence on any of the cases.

Overall, I liked this game a lot! It plays up the tragedy of the deaths in a way that a lot of classic murder mysteries don't, and the "morale" system (you get universal bonuses to all your rolls if you do things that keep the horror of it all from demotivating you, like eating a nice meal or bonding with some locals) played into that nicely. The writing was straightforward, but served its purpose well:

The neighborhood is quiet, very quiet; or perhaps that is just you, holding your breath.

I just have two main complaints (beyond the dice rolls, which—whether I liked it or not—I think it's good that the game stuck to its guns on them).

One, I wish it had been polished a bit more. The overall effect is so nice that the rough edges really stand out. For example, every time I take an action in the morgue, I get greeted by the coroner all over again; and even after I've built what I consider a very solid case against a suspect, the player character reacts with shock to finding each new piece of evidence: "If [NAME] was [new evidence], could he also be the killer?" Well, I certainly hope so, given that I've already arrested him for it!

Two, the walkthrough attached to the game shows how to get the best ending, but I have no idea how you could accomplish that without knowing the solution in advance. To prevent one of the murders, for example, you have to be patrolling in the right part of the city at the right time of night, ignoring the game unsubtly saying "you now get -3 to all rolls until you sleep". The only reason to do that (that I can tell, at least) is that you played it before and got the 911 call from that time and place.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this quite a lot, and I really hope the author continues to make more works in this vein.

The opening to this game tells you exactly what you're getting into: a good, classic cyberpunk heist, where a shady benefactor has hired you to do one last job before retirement, stealing some data from a big corporation and probably getting betrayed by the sponsor in the process. It wears its concept on its sleeve, and fortunately, it's a concept that I'm very much into.

It's a parser game written in Gamefic, a system I have no experience with (but want to look into now), and in general the system is very smooth to work with. I do wish it had a map or some sort of display of available directions, since I often found myself getting lost in the very small map, but my overall impression of the interface is positive.

The gameplay generally involves two things: hacking into devices, and "get X use X" puzzles. The hacking minigame is great fun, though I really wish it had been explained in the game itself instead of in the readme (I would _not_ have figured out the "grid" version without it), and the puzzles feel appropriately cyberpunk even when they're straightforward (scan a guy to find out what car is his, hack the car alarm to make him leave his post).

There are also some notable highlights in the writing, where the unadorned text conveys its point in a way that grand paragraphs probably wouldn't.

> \> get pencil
>
> You take the pencil.
>
> As you stand back upright, something else catches your attention from the corner of your eye.
>
> There's a dead body behind the desk.

Or, talking to your sponsor about another mercenary who was hired to take out the guards:

> "I'm surprised he was able to do that much. I broke his cover with a simple ID check."
>
> "Yeah, he wasn't too happy about that. You better hope you don't bump into him on the street."
>
> "How does he know I did it?"
>
> "I told him."

The twist was eminently predictable, but it's a staple of the genre for a reason, and it still felt good to know exactly what to do when it happened (the (Spoiler - click to show)faraday cage being nicely foreshadowed).

That said, there were some negatives too. In particular, typos or mistaken commands use up a turn, which is extremely aggravating when there's visible time pressure. And the hacking minigames are never explained in the game itself, only in the documentation. There were some other minor things that didn't really cause issues, but felt unpolished: the news articles on the TV, for example, are displayed in a random order, which is weird when some of them are meant to be followups to earlier ones.

The chain of puzzles also means there's generally only one thing you can do at a time, which means the start of the game involves a lot of fumbling around without guidance on where you need to go. The map isn't huge, so this isn't especially aggravating, but it did turn a tense in-medias-res start into a bit of a slog until I figured out which unmarked door would get me to the one device I could actually hack.

I had far too much fun with the "word" minigame, but found the other one tedious rather than fun—is there any strategy to it beyond checking every room to find the numbers you need? And the cyberware upgrade is nice, but you can access it right away at the beginning without solving any puzzles, hacking any devices, or facing any obstacles first, and there's no cost to it, so it doesn't really fit into the puzzle structure of the game. Putting a separate puzzle in front of that (maybe you don't have the money for it but can hack someone's device in the food court to steal what you need?) would help with all of these problems at once.

(I also found that device kind of confusing, because it completely trivializes the word puzzles, but in an unfun way—it lets you solve it by trying AAAAAA, BBBBBB, CCCCCC, and so on, but you have to do it by hand, which is just tedious.)

But I criticize because I want the game to be better, not because I didn't like it! Overall, this was a simple game, but it met all my expectations and I had a lot of fun with it. It's no grand work of literature, but neither are most of the things I write: it felt like it was done by someone who really loves the cyberpunk genre, and that elevated simple puzzles into a really enjoyable way to spend an hour.

This seems like a game tailored precisely for me. It's vampires planning a heist (though to assassinate someone rather than steal from them). Those are, like, my two favorite movie genres. So I went into it with high hopes.

And overall, those hopes were met! It also has numerous jokes about the life of a grad student and Jeppson's Malört, just to fine-tune it further. I'm pretty sure the author is a fan of Vampire: the Masquerade (and/or Vampire: the Requiem), given the use of terms like "sire" and "fledgling", but that's far from a complaint, coming from me, and the prose tends to get into the sort of overwrought that feels grandly operatic to me rather than tediously purple:

You settle into your own flesh, instantly delivered back into the hands of sentience. Synapses fire in reticulated order. Until this moment, you hadn't realized how little your own thoughts had been making sense. They'd been half-formed gestures at ideation, a feverish delirium. At least it's over now. You can think again.

The meeting room Lynette brings you to is oddly homey. It reminds you of the psychologists' offices at the student counseling center. Sterile enough to be a clinician's office, but dressed up with undefined trappings of home. It reminded you of when you were little, and you might catch a bug in a jar - putting a stick and a leaf in along with it to emulate its natural habitat.

He had to show you off, of course. You were no different to him than the Rolex on his wrist.

I loved the little asides about how a stake to the heart doesn't actually do anything special to vampires, a stake to the heart kills basically anything, vampires aren't special—it's a bit of a joke in the VtM community that vampires are less vulnerable to staking than humans, because it paralyzes a vampire but invariably kills living people—and Fiia's perspective was generally a delight. The premise even got me to actually read the handbook, which is a tall ask before the author has really earned my attention. (I was so sure that the Tailor being "alive and well" was a clue that vampires aren't actually undead in this world.)

Unfortunately, there were some serious speedbumps to my enjoyment that kept jarring me out of the story.

One, there are frequent tense changes. The narration switches from present to past tense and back again between paragraphs with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it got annoyingly distracting. Two, there were occasionally moments I think must have been straight-up glitches, where it switches to a different character's narration mid-paragraph with no indication (in my case, from Fiia's to Lynette's). And three, the character portraits are nice, but with only one exception they seem to exclusively show the character you chose at the beginning, which gets old quickly—they take up a lot of the screen for not much benefit.

Beyond that, I felt like there was very little for me to actually do in the story—there were some choices, but generally there were just five to ten "click to continue" links on a page, eventually leading to another page with more of them. I'm not opposed to dynamic fiction, but the constant links started to feel tedious, and in some cases, the game told me my choices didn't matter when they actually did (!), which feels like a significant no-no. (It said my choices would generally only affect the order of things, not which things happened, but after I examined the thermos first I could never go back and examine the blanket.)

Instead of all the "the last word of each sentence is a link to show the next one" things, I would have liked to make some insignificant choices at least. Things where I can characterize "my" Fiia, where it might not change the plot but it makes me think about how I want to play this. Or, barring that, just to see a whole screen at a time instead of clicking a dozen times to fill the screen.

On the flipside, some of the criticisms I've seen in other reviews didn't really strike me as problems. Some readers said Jeppson didn't strike them as especially evil, but showing Fiia's trauma flashbacks to when he flayed a subordinate alive in front of her just to show her the price of disobedience seemed very effective at changing that. (Maybe if you don't play Fiia those don't show up?) And there was one moment I especially loved but haven't seen discussed before: the letter Jeppson writes to the hunters about wanting Fiia back.

In the letter, he promises not to take any sort of revenge, if Fiia's captors either return her, or show proof that she was destroyed. That little note felt vitally important. To me, that showed that Jeppson doesn't care about Fiia; he cares about plugging an information leak. He doesn't care if she's dead, as long as she's not in his enemies' hands. To me that was the moment that established that Jeppson's lovebombing Fiia was a method of control rather than any actual affection, and I think it was very effective at it.

There were a few other complaints—seriously, these people are professionals but they couldn't tell blood from paint, find an MFA student in a university directory, or figure out why an oil painter would have turpentine on hand?—but they're small by comparison. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the story and the characters, I just wish it had gone through a bit more editing to improve the actual experience of reading it.

The classic setup for a mystery is a murder, but it can also be fun to do a bit of lower-stakes problem-solving, too. In this case, the beer in the local pub has all gone bad, and it falls to you to figure out why. Speaking personally, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good beer and "something really bad, rotten, just all wrong", but to the protagonist this is very important.

Searching through the pub, you find some clues, and the supernatural elements build in a very effective way; I loved the vignettes with the fridge and the cellar, for example. And then you're suddenly experiencing the moment of the ghost's death, and have to prevent it. The prose is very effective and conveys the mood without going purple, and the little moments of "wait, what's happening" were a definite high point. I also liked how the search for clues was implemented thoroughly but dully, to contrast the mundane investigation you've been tasked with against the unexplainable interruptions.

Beyond that, though, it didn't quite manage to stick the landing, for me. Preventing a ghost's death in the past is a great hook for a puzzle, but the puzzle itself ((Spoiler - click to show)pick up object, take it to room) felt underwhelming by comparison, and some aspects (like looping through the scene exactly three times, no more) felt more like contrivances than mysteries. There's also a bit of an over-reliance on "You can see X here" when I think custom-written paragraphs would have provided more flavor.

The game also presents an ASK/TELL conversation system with a TOPICS command, but TOPICS always tells you the same thing (rather than adapting to what's happened), and most things I tried to ASK/TELL about got default responses, which left me playing guess-the-noun (and finding the whole process a bit unsatisfying). I think a TALK TO command might have worked better here, or a choice-based conversation system; as it stands, I got somewhat bogged down in a comparatively uninteresting part of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and the bait-and-switch in the first part is very well orchestrated. I just would have liked the standard Inform mechanics to get out of my way a little more and stop clouding the well-written prose.

I loved the concept of this one, but would have liked a bit more thorough implementation.

The idea is that there are two things in front of you: something, and another thing. But you're in a place where names—in fact, nouns in general—don't exist. Can you figure out what these two things are, and use them to escape?

This is an absolutely delightful idea, and something that can only really work in a text format. And WNIEN executes it well! The process of piecing together these two things didn't take long, which meant the concept didn't wear out its welcome, but also left me wanting more. Once I'd established that (Spoiler - click to show)one was portable and the other wasn't, I tried (Spoiler - click to show)putting one on the other, and that was that.

With only two nouns in the game, it also felt especially bad to hit an unimplemented verb. This feels like a situation that lives or dies by how many absurd verbs it includes, and on that front, I was left somewhat wanting.

Still, this is a great idea for a game, I enjoyed it as the little amuse-bouche it was, and I really hope to see more works in this vein, that leverage the medium of interactive text for something that really couldn't possibly work any other way.

Oh, this was lovely. A choice-based story about a ghost bound to a family home, materializing at five different points in the life of the mother and son who live there, and trying to help them. There are some basic puzzles (mostly about examining everything and then figuring out which thing will be useful in each situation), which make the story feel more personal—it helps me relate to the protagonist and their curiosity and their motivation to help.

The overall tone is melancholy in a very sweet way. You’re no longer alive; none of the people in the story can see you, or know that you’re there, or how you’ve saved them. But that doesn’t really matter. You’ve manifested to help them, and that’s what you’re going to do, whether they know it or not.

The final scene (“Act V”) consists of two reveals, one after another; the second I’d been suspecting for a while ((Spoiler - click to show)you’re not the ghost of a human) but that didn’t make it any less touching. And then you finally pass on, just as the family starts to realize who and what you were. It was very sweet, and may or may not have brought a tear to my eye.

An excellent little piece, and another one that I recommend to everyone.

This is the other Grand Guignol I tested. It’s a very cool experiment: a “parserless parser” game (in a custom-made framework no less), which has a parser-y world model but no free-form input. Instead, you’re presented with a list of possible commands each turn: moving in different directions, taking various objects, and so on. It also has a map which shows your location and the locations of any NPCs you’ve met, which is extremely convenient in a game of this size (49 rooms in a 7×7 grid).

The only commands given to interact with objects are TAKE, DROP, TALK TO, and POSSESS, and the last of those is the core of the game: you’re a demonic spirit trying to escape from Hell by jumping from body to body. Each person you can possess adds one additional verb (an accountant can COUNT, an overseer can WHIP, a succubus can SMOOCH, a golem can SHOVE, a ghost can RAGE, a vampire can BITE, and so on), so maneuvering the right bodies to the right places is the key to solving many of the puzzles. (EXAMINE is also on the verb list but is just for flavor and never necessary.)

The overall tone of the game is light and whimsical, but never falls across the line into outright goofiness: the protagonist takes their escape attempt very seriously, as they break into the palace of the Princes of Hell and try to distract each of them away from the alarm. I really liked the writing, and spent a long while just counting forms in the first room, looking at the crimes that had gotten various IF protagonists sentenced to eternal damnation. (“Naomi Cragne: …I don’t know where to even start…”) And the humor hadn’t grown stale by the end of the game, which is no mean feat!

The puzzles were also quite good, and the body-swapping (with each body having a single extra verb) was a clever way to allow a wide variety of actions without overwhelming the player with links. There’s only one I consider unfair: (Spoiler - click to show)as the ghost, you can click the grayed-out direction links to pass through walls. While I did need a couple hints, everything else felt quite reasonable with the limited options presented, and figuring out how to (Spoiler - click to show)get Bernard out of the office was a great moment of discovery.

The first Grand Guignol I’m playing is also one that I tested, because it’s currently got only 12 ratings and I’d like to increase that number. This is another of Schultz’s Prime Pro Rhyme Row games, like There Those Dare Doze, based on rhyming alliterative pairs of words.

This one has some very helpful features that TTDD lacked, such as telling you when a command is half-right, or needs a homophone, and giving hints in return for good-but-wrong guesses. It means that coming up with a good pair feels good, and actually helps you in the game, even when it’s not the solution the author had in mind.

Unfortunately, the implementation of these features feels incomplete. Examining the help device, for example, only tells you how to turn it on—even when it’s already on—and prints “(hard to do without taking it, so you do)” every time, even when you already have it. It’s supposed to tell you when you have a command half-right, but sometimes didn’t, for no apparent reason. (I typed (Spoiler - click to show)PHONING FAE instead of PHONING FEY and got a generic error.)

The writing similarly feels a lot less coherent than in TTDD. The plot of that game was slightly absurd (which is to be expected from a wordplay game like this) but both the story and the geography made sense: you’re travelling in different directions to find other people, and convince them to help you wake the Prayer Pros in the Rare Rows.

This game is a lot vaguer, without much of an overarching structure or geography to connect its various areas. And while it has a lot more rhymes implemented than TTDD, I was still often annoyed when a perfectly good pair wasn’t recognized. (Or, in one case, caused an RTP: “TOE TALL” at the Woe Wall led to a division by zero.)

Finally, for a specific example, there’s a place where the author has clearly put a lot of effort into punishing players who use a bad word (you’re asked to find rhymes for “why witch” and the game tells you specifically not to insult the woman in front of you; if you do, the game snarks at you and crashes itself). But I have to wonder—who does this benefit? Whose experience is improved by this feature? The writing is nice and snarky, but wouldn’t it have been better to just leave the command unrecognized (as other unpleasant words are; you can’t rhyme “wee wight” with “she shite”, for example), and dedicate that effort to polishing the rest of the game? It reminds me somewhat of Graham Nelson going to great pains to hide “swearing mildly” and “swearing obscenely” from Inform 7’s index…which just made it really annoying to remove them if you didn’t want them, and didn’t really benefit anyone.

All in all, I had fun with it. The wordplay puzzles were great! And I think there’s a really solid, really fun game between CSDD’s user-friendliness and hint system and TTDD’s cohesive plot and well-arranged structure. I just wish it had been one game instead of two, because as it is, both of them felt slightly lacking.

The Singularity has come. The world (as you know it) will end in seven days. What will you do?

This is a melancholic, somewhat mournful short story with a choice-based interface. It has the odd interface gimmick that the first click on any link just distorts it into a blurred mess, and you have to click it a second time to actually do anything; I’m not sure what purpose this serves, except to make certain “click a link within three seconds or the game will do it for you” choices even more annoying.

Interface aside, I enjoyed the story a lot. You have seven days left to live. There’s only one choice: what will you spend those days doing? Going out and interacting with the people around you? Or staying in and trying to work on your art? Neither of them really means anything, in the end—neither your work nor your friends will outlive you. So what meaning will you make of them? The writing is sad and bleak, but also more than a little bit hopeful, in an existential way.

Like with Cell 174, this is a work that I’d call a short story rather than a game. The focus is really on the writing, and what it encourages the player to think about. If you knew this was the end of everything, that nothing in your world would exist a week from now, what would you want to be doing? What would matter to you? The game somewhat tries to offer an answer—if you try to (Spoiler - click to show)split your time between writing and socializing your character regrets it all at the end—and I somewhat wish it didn’t. But there is plenty to contemplate, all the same, and this work has a particular feel that’s unlike anything else in the comp.

You’re trapped in a nightmare. But not just a nightmare. Every time you wake up it just changes—you might wake up from being chased by a monster to find your lover crumbling to dust in your arms. (Always “your lover”, not gendered, which is a nice touch even if it sometimes makes for awkward writing.)

This is a choice-based horror puzzle game written in Ink. Your goal is to break out of the recursive nightmare you’re in, and at first it seems like a Groundhog Day time loop, where there’s one “correct” path through the tree of options that will set you free. But there isn’t; there’s something else you have to do.

(Spoiler - click to show)You need to use information from each nightmare in the others. When you’re being chased by a monster, you can run into a tattoo parlor, which reminds you of matching tattoos you and your lover got—and those tattoos are how you break out of the nightmare where they fall apart into dust. This works especially well in Ink, which keeps a transcript of all your past choices for you to consult.

The “aha!” moment of figuring out this puzzle was very cool. Unfortunately, the end result didn’t feel much different from “find the one correct path”. I just couldn’t figure out how to use the clues I was given: (Spoiler - click to show)my lover wanted to go to the church and then get coffee, but the solution isn’t to go to the church or the coffee shop, it’s to go behind the church. In hindsight I can see how this makes sense, but while playing, I ended up lawnmowering the last nightmare (trying each option one by one) until I came across the one that worked.

All in all, it’s a very cool idea, and I like the sort of horror on show here—it’s different from anything else I’ve played in this comp, and offers very satisfying catharsis. But my experience would have been a lot better if the clues had been a little bit clearer, and some of the red herrings removed. I understand why some red herring options need to exist, for the puzzle to be satisfying instead of “click this link to win”. But I ended up giving up on the right answer to the final puzzle because those red herrings made me think I was on completely the wrong track.

It’s a beautiful day in the mansion, and you are a horrible ghost. A new owner has just purchased your ancestral estate and is about to bring their awful corporeal biological presence into it. You have five hours to make the house as spooky as possible and put a stop to this!

This is a lighthearted choice-based optimization game. As you roam about the mansion you find various spooky tricks you could play on the owner; each increases the “spookiness” of the house by a certain amount, but each also costs a certain amount of time. The goal is to get the maximum spookiness in the five hours allotted.

It’s not an especially difficult optimization problem—you only have one resource to worry about, so you just need to choose all the haunts that have the best spookiness-to-time ratio—but I enjoyed the tone and the writing a lot. I played this with some of my family and they loved the ghost’s analysis of their various little tricks, and the different endings you could get with different levels of optimization. This one is definitely getting a high rating from me.

This one appears to be the third in a series I haven’t played, but hopefully it stands on its own. It takes the format of a text conversation, with messages from your contacts appearing one by one, and you choosing how to respond. The visual presentation is quite sleek, though I honestly wish it had been simpler—I spent a long time waiting for text to slowly fade in, even when it’s a choice for me to click rather than a message from someone else, and the messages floating around in different directions and bumping into each other was mildly distracting. Sometimes I could scroll down too far and leave the whole conversation behind; other times the messages were cut off at the bottom and I couldn’t scroll down any further. The background music was atmospheric, though I turned it off after a little bit.

(The flow of this review is different from the rest because I keep tabbing over to work on this while I wait for the messages to appear. It takes a while.)

Interface issues aside, this is a spooky little short story told through online chats. Your mother messages you to say that your friend has arrived, and is waiting in your room. Then your friend messages to say they got delayed on the train. So who, or what, is it that your mother just let into the house??

Sadly I found the climax less compelling than the premise. (Spoiler - click to show)Your friend’s doppelganger starts messaging you in Zalgo text and sending you uncanny pictures from the internet. I’m not sure if the bathos was intended or not, but it ended up feeling like a bit of a letdown after the spooky premise. I somewhat wish the entity itself had been left in the background, rather than messaging you directly, because only hearing about it secondhand could keep it both scary and vague at the same time.

I enjoyed this one, but I wish the climax had kept up the spooky atmosphere from the beginning.

From the description, this one seems to be a parser puzzlefest written in Inform 7. You’re a 12-year-old trick-or-treating on your own for the first time, and perhaps inadvisably decided to knock on Old Man McGuffin’s door. He chose “trick” and left you with a strange device that traps you in a time loop: after seventeen turns, you’re reset to the start of the game.

Unfortunately, I think this is the first Petite Mort I can’t solve on my own. I like the idea a lot, but the implementation just confuses me too deeply. I started making a map, and ended up finding a loop that I can’t reconcile: going north, west, south, west, west from the front yard brings you back to it again. I found a way to leave the device behind (put it in the box, close the box, drop the box) but it keeps being described as in my hand. “Fields of rustling corn” are an impassible barrier, while “an impenetrable line of trees” is an exit you can use.

With hints, I managed to solve it. I like the puzzle, but the implementation gets in the way frustratingly often. Some important actions persist across time loops, like (Spoiler - click to show)PULL ROPE, and give confusing error messages if you try them after already doing them on a previous loop. McGuffin expects you to say “trick or treat” when you find him later, and prints the same text as at the beginning, but doesn’t reset the loop. Using commands that are slightly off, like (Spoiler - click to show)SHOW BOX instead of GIVE BOX, does nothing. I like the game, but the implementation issues keep me from really recommending it.

Epistolary IF! I always love it when a piece makes use of the medium in a clever way.

This is a Twine work where the classic “click links to change their text; click other links to move on to the next page” represents the process of editing a letter. The story is told through the general outline of each letter; you can write and rewrite certain passages to your liking, then send it off. The story then advances to the next letter, a week or two later.

The protagonist is Helen Compton, recently married, writing letters home to tell her sister about her marriage. I’m slightly ashamed to admit how long it took me to realize what story was being adapted here, because in hindsight there were so many clear indications—in other words, I was as clueless as Helen about who her new husband was.

There are a few different endings you can get; I found three, and I think the first one I got (before I went back and chose “all the first option”, “all the second option”, and “all the third option”) was the best. The writing was excellent, it used the medium in a clever way, and the length and pacing were top-notch. This might be my new favorite to win the comp.

This is a ChoiceScript game set in Imperial Constantinople, which I think means it’s somewhere between ~400 and ~1400 CE—my knowledge of history is unfortunately much weaker than my knowledge of historical languages! You’re a sea captain named Peter, a guest at a high-society party thrown by your friend Demetrios, entertaining “merchants draped in cloth and woman with intricate veils, scholars sitting straight, Imperial administrators proudly sporting their badges of office”.

All of them speak exclusively in rhyme, and look down on you for not being able to do the same. Your goal is to tell them a story that will satisfy them. (The rhyming seems to represent some sort of linguistic difference: at one point a friend of yours abandons rhyme and “shift[s] down into the common register”. It’s a neat touch, because it makes the high-prestige register sound both difficult to execute and faintly absurd, which is presumably how Peter sees it.)

The story you tell them is, unfortunately, very short. You get one real choice to make during it—which is an interesting one! And the writing is certainly engaging.

But even after a couple different playthroughs, I was left wanting more. The four-hour deadline puts tight limits on how much writing can be in a Petite Mort game, but I wish a little more of it had been dedicated to the story itself, and a little less to the frame narrative. Both the high society of Constantinople and the strange affairs happening out at sea are fun and engaging, yet the overall impression I’m left with is that I want a proper serving of either one, rather than just a little taste of both.

P.S. I was tempted to write this in rhyme, but decided it’d take too much time. I might have to try again later, when I’m done with my duties as rater.

This is a work that I’m not quite sure how to describe. It’s a very short parser game written in Inform 7, and it’s quick to play—usually over in just a couple of turns. You’re riding in a buggy (as in the type of cart), in pursuit of a mysterious foe.

I recommend playing it, because it’s hard to say much more than that without spoiling its central conceit. So go do that first. Or, if you don’t care about spoilers:

(Spoiler - click to show)The core of this game is puns. The game is buggy, in the sense that it’s got (intentional) typos and also in the sense that that’s what you’re riding. You’re as good-looking as Ever (your brother Everett), and you can jump on the spot fruitfully (catching a branch of crab-apples). You think there’s a Suchthing around, but you can’t quite see it. The fourth wall is thin here, and every message the parser produces is also happening in the world itself.

This is another short game, where getting an ending takes only a couple turns but there are plenty of different endings to find, and I think that’s the right structure for it—its brand of surrealness would get old if it were drawn out much further. Though I do wish I could eventually find out what we’re pursuing.

This one is more interactive poetry than interactive fiction: a sequence of stanzas hyperlinked together, with additional lines that show up when you click particular words. It’s a genre that I haven’t seen much of before, but one that seems very well-suited to Twine’s format.

It’s about gay vampire lovers, which I adore. The writing is quite nice, and the poem overall is short but sweet. It feels like it’s just the length it should be.

I want to comment more on it, but unfortunately I’ve never been great at this type of criticism—I can write a lot about my feelings on different types of gameplay, but that’s not especially relevant here. So I’ll conclude by saying simply that I enjoyed it, and quoting a passage I especially liked:


only you love him the way
a wound bays for the knife
a raw socket misses the tooth
restless tongue probing
cavernous ache.

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.

The idea behind this game is an interesting one: break into a secure system using a simulation of an actual Unix shell, with a time limit. But the actual implementation fell short.

The faux terminal has no scrollback, which is irritating, and the line editing is brittle: I managed to make it so I couldn't type at one point and had to refresh the page. The shell commands are inconsistently defined. `rm` doesn't work on anything except what you're supposed to delete; attempting to delete other files says they're "not found". Directories say they're full even after deleting all of their contents. In a longer game, little errors like this would be forgivable, but this game is so short that they really detract from the experience.

That said, the actual puzzle in this game is a nice bit of fun, and the aesthetic is good. With a bit more polishing this would make a good minicomp entry.