Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a piece of paid content available to subscribers when it came out but now only available through individual purchase.

In this exceptional story, you are invited to the most popular gala of the season! Well, invited is a strong term. More like being compelled to be there. As a servant. In a hotel built of literal nightmares.

Unlike many other exceptional stories, this one is very long and also location-based: you work on a hotel with 5 or 6 floors, each with their own rooms and tenants, and their own deck (fallen london features a randomized deck of encounters). There is also inventory management: as a servant, you must carry laundry to the basement to be washed, and then return it; go to the kitchen to order food, pick it up, and deliver it; and fetch items.

This provides for a sense of mundane drudgery, but that's contrasted by both the setting (all the tenants are horrific cosmic horror entities, vicious powerbrokers, or hapless victims, and reality and your mind warp around you) and by the text (Chandler Groover explained in a blog post how every bit of text that might seem repeated is actually written fresh, so while the actions are repetitive the text never is).

It also plays around with Fallen London mechanics, using up way more actions than a usual Exceptional Story but 'paying' you in a variety of objects you can pick up around the place, and using unusual 0-cost actions for the finale. Your Nightmares score, something you usually try very hard to get less than 8 (because it usually sends you to this very hotel) rockets to 14, 18, and much much higher. The 'unaccountably peckish' attribute, something that usually must be deeply avoided (it spawns black cards in your deck that are unavoidable and set you on a quest to permanently delete your character) is played with here in a way that felt cool.

It has extensive lore connections, primarily to anything involving dreams.

Many people rank this as the best Exceptional Story. I think there is no clear superior to it; other Chandler Groover stories and the ever-popular orphan story HOJOTOHO have their own positive features that make them competitive.

Edit: I like this comment from Fallen London discord:
"I know so many folks have praised Bloody Wallpaper's themes and setting, but the thing that stuck out to me most about it on top of those hideous joys is the way it plays like an old school parser IF. I thought it really managed to capture the tone and playstyle of a totally different format, and that was such a pleasure"

This game was entered in a PunyInform competition.

It's a compact game, with a couple of rooms containing animals. Due to your misdeeds against the animal kingdom, you've been sentenced to hanging out in a hotel and helping a frog sleep.

The writing shines best when describing nature, like the animals and the final scene.

The puzzles are a bit unfair; I was pretty bewildered about what to do for a while until running to hints, and then still having trouble. I got the main puzzle really easily (Spoiler - click to show)(even without hints, if you ask frog about scale, it gives you a puzzle that tells you word length corresponds to weight, and the archimedean principle is pretty clear, but figuring out how to get the items to carry it out is hard, and there are a lot of red herrings. One thing that would improve things significantly is if (Spoiler - click to show)the egg on the penguin's head was explicitly mentioned if you call them out at the right time).

Overall, it was interesting, and the nature imagery was memorable.

In this game, you are an exorcist, shunned by normal people. After a compelling intro, you enter a small town with a grid-like map and spend 49 days exploring the map, hearing about ghost cases and solving problems.

This is one of the last two games not to get ratings. Once I started it, it became crystal clear why that was so. Further play only strengthened my initial impression.

This is a fantastic game that seems deadset on making it very hard for the player to experience it. It has achingly slow text; double clicking can speed it up, but even when sped up, it was still deeply slow (I’d click 5-10 times per paragraph). In a short game, that can be a moderate annoyance, but this is one of the longest games in the competition.

You have 49 days to investigate different cases. Each day you have a possibility of receiving messages on your answering machine, telling you where to go on a map. You have the option to investigate a square, do divination at a square, go to the library, ward yourself, or rest.

Cases have timers; people can just die if you’re too slow. But cases also overlap, so you’ll get urgent messages each day. But, and I can’t stress this enough, picking the wrong option wastes an entire day with no way to undo or save. Compounding this is the fact that every few nights ghosts get closer and closer to your bed and will kill you if you don’t Ward yourself. So if you pick the wrong option on a case, you waste a day, someone may die in a case you didn’t pursue, you yourself have to ward again so that you don’t die, and a huge chunk of the game has passed.

Dying puts you back to a checkpoint. There was a strange coin button on my screen that I thought picked where my checkpoints were if I clicked on it, but I later realized it was a stray sprite left over from the divination.

All told, this makes this an very player-unfriendly game. I suspect that the time never played through the full game without using cheats of some kind; this kind of thing can usually be picked up on by people playing their own games repeatedly (if it’s not fun for you without cheats, it won’t be fun for players). And I’ve seen these kinds of design patterns before; there’s a fear that players will just skim your text and lawnmower your game, so one approach is to slow down text, remove saves, add harsh consequences, obscure choices (for instance, if you pick a wrong conversation path in the game, you can die or lose a case with no undo), etc. All of this makes it impossible to speed-read or lawnmower. But there are other ways to get engagement; the game already has multiple interesting goals and engaging puzzles. Just taking away the slow text and the night time deaths would make the game way more fun.

Behind all of these barriers mentioned above, the game itself is fantastic. Great hand-made art, really good writing with distinct characters and unique plotlines, and fun coin and map-based mechanics.

Getting to the end was excruciating. I’m not sure how many people will be willing to finish this game as-is. But if there were ever a new version that at least removed the slow text timer and added at least one more player friendly feature (like saves or a limited undo feature, or a guide or walkthrough, or taking away the random deaths), then I would be able to heartily recommend the excellent parts of this game.

This game was part of Iron ChIF, and it is a good showing for a game written in a short time period. I particularly loved the setting, characters, and the voice of the narrator.

You play as a fairy attached by a string to a mysterious stranger who has a device that labels things in an unfamiliar language. You are accompanied by an elf and a human who are fighting off gobling while you, the fairy, guide the human to different objects in an attempt to reassemble ancient machinery.

Hilariously, you don't know the names of anything, so your inventory in the game can have a gizmo, a whozit, a doodad, etc.

I had trouble getting started since the game requires leaps of intuition, but without hints I was soon seeing patterns, taking notes, and having some good successes.

One thing this game does really well is reward you for right actions. I remember reading an Adam Cadre interview where he said that every piece of text the player sees should be rewarding, and that happens here. Never do you pass a milestone without getting more lore, more characterization, or a funny moment or some kind of action.

While I didn't vote in the competition, I believe both games were great. The other game did a better job, I think, with the theme, but this game did better, I think, with the core IF elements.

This is one of the more recent Choice of Games titles. In it, you play as a contestant in a series of games to become the Monarch's Eye, a title that is like being a bodyguard or right-hand man.

The contests are extensive and important, with each one occupying its own chapter as well as having establishing chapters, preparations, and fallout. They include physical and mental contests.

Along the way, you try to balance the two main factions in the country, merchants (rich) and artisans (laborers). You can favor one side or another and date representatives from different groups.

Gender is a major theme in the game, with the Monarch switching favored gender every chapter or so and a whole system of titles invented for the game.

Some people have expressed frustration with the game forcing you to honor the Monarch in most choices. You do occasionally have a chance to oppose them. Other criticisms include the game not signalling the effects of choices very well, making it unclear why you fail when something goes wrong.

Overall, I enjoyed some of the romances and I liked the actual contest parts quite a bit. I was glad I purchased this.

This game was written in a short time as part of a competition for using the Dialog language.

It reminded me of both Hadean Lands in its setting and Heaven's Vault in its handling of translation.

You find an alien ship crashed on a moon next to your own crashed ship. In it, you discover a device that tells you the names of things in the alien language.

Using this, you can begin to decipher the alien words and piece the puzzle together of how to survive.

I played this without hints until the final puzzle, where I got stuck. My main issue that I had was (Spoiler - click to show)I thought the red sphere and blue sphere just needed to 'charge' and so you had to point them at the same thing for 3 seconds, then it worked. That got me the message I needed from the blue sphere but made the red one usually repeat itself, except when I pointed the red one at a whole sentence when it would do one word of that sentence at a time. So I thought then that it was just a thing that repeated three words of a sentence and would take shorter phrases and just repeat them to fill up those three slots.

Overall, it was satisfying and is one of the better language puzzles I've seen.

I had a couple very minor issues with implementation. One was that the 'shiny label' in the first ship room seemed important, but X LABEL didn't work. I think that occasionally other parts of objects weren't implemented by themselves, but I can't quite remember the rest. The important command (Spoiler - click to show)TOUCH WITH often resulted in the slightly confusing message (Spoiler - click to show)You can't put anything on __. The other thing was that clicking on a word brought up a prompt to rename it but didn't add cursor focus to that prompt, so you had to click manually. That might need tinkering with the javascript to fix but it isn't a serious impediment in any case.

Overall, it's impressive a game this complex was made in such a short time.

This is the last game I'm playing/reviewing in Ectocomp, and is the most-rated one in the comp so far. Having played it, it's easy to see why.

You play as an employee in a firm that seems to specialize in educational software. For some reason, you constantly get emails intended for people that aren't you.

The game was trickier than I expected, and I wasn't paying attention at first, so I didn't know who to forward emails to for a while (which is part of the gameplay). This enhanced the experience, as it got several people mildly annoyed at me and made me feel like we were all playing the same game in multiplayer.

Then, things begin to change. The workload gets harder in ways that shouldn't be possible, and a greater burden has to be shouldered. The ending is ambiguous, which I liked.

Unlike most petite mort games (which tend to be quick sketches of games due to the time constraints), it seemed to completely polished and fully fleshed-out, which makes sense as it seems to be scoped well (with a system that doesn't require much branching, if any, but still rewards interaction by having you guess who to forward an email to).

A great game to end the competition on!

This is a polished-looking Ink game with a great story arc, solid writing and interesting characters. It has frequent strong profanity that seems natural to the characters.

You play as someone who is currently presenting as a man during a date. Your best friend Tom is coaching you, Cyrano de Bergerac style, on how best to romance your date. As things go on, facts come out. Gender identity is a central component of the story.

There are a variety of ways it can end, some shorter than others. It took me a few replays to see how the author cleverly handled the scope of the game without letting it get out of hand (by funneling several types of choices to the same results).

The horror here is the horror of self-hatred (in my interpretation). Pretty much every path leads to some kind of self-loathing. The other narrative thread I identified is toxic friendship.

I think that most people on the forum will find something rewarding in playing this game.

This was a compact but complex puzzle game, impressive for being written in 4 hours.

You are a ghost, only able to interact with the world once each year. The house you are in is being used for a vacation by guests. Your goal is to interact with them to guide them to the truth.

Unfortunately, you are very weak, and time is short. I found myself struggling (in character) to do almost anything, like opening windows and doors. But after replaying several times and exploring, I discovered the pattern needed to win.

Dialog and presentation were good and the puzzles were engaging and not too hard or too easy. Great work.

This game is a speed-IF parser game. Like many parser authors have done before, this author has chosen to write a 'my apartment' game, spending a lot of time on a familiar setting. Appliances are the most common item to be implemented, each with at least something to do. It's hard to implement a whole apartment in 4 hours, but the scope has been narrowed to just two rooms.

Other than that, there's not much to talk about.

Besides, of course, the corpse on the couch. But that's another story for another day.