Reviews by MathBrush

I intended on playing all of the FrenchComp 25 (or, more properly, the Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone) games in a week or two, and then I found this game.

Altogether, it took me over a week to finish. This is quite a big game, with the unusual feature that almost every part of it is illustrated with beautiful ASCII art, including the inventory screen (showing our heroine and the things she carries), a map, and all of the NPCs and several important items.

The source code is huge (partly due to the art), currently the second-largest file I've personally ever opened in terms of words and the longest in terms of lines (in Inform 7).

But is it well-made and fun?

I think so. The idea is that you are a spy sent to pose as a laundrywoman in the mansion of a count rumored to be a Russian general in disguise. You have to infiltrate the mansion, gain everyone's trust, and do everything you can to promote the communist cause, with missions of increasing importance.

Gameplay is almost entirely choice-based, with numbered and lettered menu options. Occasionally it was fiddly; if you want to look at something you're holding, you must open the inventory before looking at it. Similarly, if you want to use an item you're holding, you have to open the inventory. Making the wrong choice can take a few turns to get back on track as you have to opt out of the menu you're in.

But once you get practice with the system, it works well.

I didn't encounter any major bugs. After 5 days of making progress on my own (real life days; in the game I was on night 3) I asked for hints from the author, who obliged. Following the hints got me stuck twice due to not doing the things that I should have done first ((Spoiler - click to show)I didn't find the elevator before getting the photographic kit, and I didn't open the crates before sabotaging them). However, I found cheat codes in the source text which let me skip exactly those parts.

There is a great deal of text in the game, most of it very interesting. The characters are nuanced and there is a lot of tension, especially with our spy handler who is also likely our lover.

Some puzzles were a bit hard to figure out, but it's hard to know whether that's due to me not knowing French or because the game is hard. Playing in a foreign language casts a rosy glow over a game for me, so a native speaker may find it less fun or more fun than I did, I suppose. I don't know!

The text presented in-game is thoroughly pro-communist, extolling the virtues of the worker and decrying the capitalist system. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've read many texts by church leaders in the 1910's to 1980's that warned of communism as one of the greatest threats in the world, a godless conspiracy that killed millions and had the goal to destroy religion, abolish the nuclear family (since kids are raised communally in traditional communism) and so on. So it's interesting to hear full-throated explanations on both sides for why essentially the same actions are either a great evil or the greatest good.

Overall, puzzle highlights include using a wartime code-sender and operating (Spoiler - click to show)a tank and various old-fashioned tools.

A fun game. A long game; it takes place over 5 days and each day is basically a complete game. I thought that the first day would be about it (getting into the basement) and was shocked there was more; in fact, there was a lot more, I hadn't even seen half the map and seeing the whole map isn't even half the game! I'd say it's similar in size to Counterfeit Monkey and Anchorhead (maybe a bit smaller than Anchorhead, it's hard to tell. More dialogue, certainly).

This game is structured like a linear visual story, with black and white hand-drawn images. It won the Short Game Showcase.

Here are the criteria I use to judge things with:

-Polish: The game is both polished and Polish (the author is from Poland), so it doubly fits here. More seriously, the game uses a variety of textual techniques to vary the appearance and the writing had no typos that I saw.
-Descriptiveness: The writing was vivid and I was able to picture what was going on.
-Interactivity/Use of medium: While there was little interactivity, I also use this category for the artwork and structure of visual novels. The art definitely contributed to the overall feeling here, expressing disinterested observation, alienation, fear, isolation, and determination.
-Emotional impact: I actually originally played this game for the first few pages a while ago and stopped because I didn't like what it was about. Finishing it later, it was not what I had originally expected. Both times I felt a strong emotional reaction.
-Would I play again?: Yes, I think I would, there's a lot here that is of interest.

Naarel is a prolific author who has a great back-catalogue. Because of that, I think I've been spoiled a bit with their back-catalogue. This particular game, while it has a compelling narrative, lacks some of the awesome interactions or beautiful styling/images I've seen in their other games.

What's this one about? A train is passing by (in fact, it will always pass you by!) which causes you to reflect on your place in life, your hopes, your dreams, your constraints.

Choices are one per page, with a little bit of fancy choice-usage near the end. The story is neatly divided into chunks of relatively similar size to each other.

The style of writing is evocative and emotional. It uses different sense, mentions concrete details, and has a nice plot arc in a short space.

Exceptional stories are extra bits of bonus content in Fallen London that tell their own stories.

This is one of the earliest ever put in the game. It introduces some great lore that gets used a lot later on (and which I'm glad I finally got the origin story of) and has an awesome benefit (you can buy mirrorcatch boxes any time you want), but it's a lot shorter and mechanically a bit less interesting than later stories.

The idea is that people are selling sunlight in illegal mirrored boxes, and you can end up interacting with the people doing the selling. Sunlight can be illegal; living in Fallen London can make sunlight deadly to you, so this is very dangerous contraband.

The issue is that it's also making people see things. Because, as the title says, it's been cut with Moonlight. And moonlight makes you see things in a very different way.

The best part is exploring the 'alternate london' that occurs when you've consumed the moonlight. Very fun.

Fallen London has a large number (one a month for years) of 'Exceptional Stories' that you can pay extra for to get more of a self-contained narrative than the usual plotline.

Over the years, this has consistently been one of the more popular ones. In Fallen London, there are 4 'menaces' that, if they grow to big, take you to a penalty area you have to hang out in for a while. They are jail, an asylum, social exile, and, lastly, death, represented by a dark river where a boatman is rowing to the other side, and you have to persuade him to turn back.

This story is about the boatman. Three revolutionaries have blown themselves up. Since death is temporary in this game, you could just wait for them to come back, but the damage is severe. So you are tasked by the police with going to the river of the dead and investigating them there.

While there, Death lets you take a turn at the oars, letting you become the ferryman of the dead. It becomes your task to find the three criminals, row them across, listen to their story, and decide whether they should return to life or not.

There's a lot of lore here, with connections to Parabola, the Masters, the Calendar Council, parts of the Nemesis ambition, and others. A great story for those looking to get into Exceptional Stories in general.

This is an exceptional story, a part of Fallen London that requires additional money and is more self-contained than the rest of the story.

The focus here is mostly on the writing and on piecing things together. Someone is on the lookout for a very old and special soul. The further you investigate, the more you realize that you are reading a retelling of an ancient greek myth.

This story has a lot of lore about devils and the means they take to shape souls ot have the 'flavour' they like. It also introduces some iron coins that force devils to tell a truth to whoever holds it.

Some other players found this story to be a bit short or to have a disappointing ending. I don't remember being unsatisfied.

This was a funny Exceptional Story from Fallen London. Exceptional Stories are paid stories that are more self-contained than most content in Fallen London and take a few hours to complete.

In this story, you've been asked to run a fashion boutique and to come up with different outfits based on increasingly ludicrous themes. As you have no prior experience and the clothing is genuinely kind of questionable, you have to wonder: what are the real motives behind your employment?

Gameplay mostly consists of wandering around London or your workshop to get ideas for the new clothes, plus some investigative sequences.

Overall, it was fun making the outfits (you can choose to keep one if you wish) and the newly revealed plot was fun.

I thought this game was really neat. You're presented with two choices at first, which you can click on, but the game immediately twists the way its presented into a really cool format.

The game has a French option and an English option and while I love French, I'll definitely pick the English option whenever given one.

The story is that you're visiting a psychiatrist. You can choose how your part of the conversation goes. There's a variety of options, and each one gives a voice over.

The game isn't really that long and may not be everyone's cup of tea, I just liked the self-referential parts. The '2/5' and the game's tagline of 'A pretentious, bland and predictable game, just like its author' refer to in-game comments and reviews left on the author's IF, and you deal with the feelings that that leaves you (which I found really relatable). Very glad the author wrote this!

This was a really clever game. It's currently implemented in Google Calendar, which means it may be ephemeral media; but the author is able to export a google calendar for download (player's can't as they don't have permissions to edit), so I hope they do so to keep this for future generations!

Playing the game means adding the google calendar to a google account (I used a burner account). You then look at appointments and the information in them. They link to real google earth locations and to youtube videos and, at the end, to pdfs.

Gameplay for me consisted of a lot of searching of names and keywords. The game is clever and makes some posts only consist of symbols to keep you from seeing everything at once by searching for 'le' or something like that (although basic words like that don't work anyway).

The story is science fiction and is non-linear in nature, and I experienced some ending things before some middle things. Themes include relationships, loss, liminal spaces, the Backrooms (?), and more. A lot of fun to experiment with. I don't think it holds much replay value but that's not intended anyway, I think.

Google translate works great for this game, very easy to copy and paste into another window and many of the links and some words are in English.

This French game in Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2025 was a delight to play. It's a puzzle-focused Vorple game with extensive parser illustrations. Puzzles are fairly simple (although my lack of knowledge of a few words caused me some problems).

While the game doesn't feel small, each part of the game is pretty constrained so there aren't too many options and you are free to experiment till you figure out what to do next. There was one poem that was a bit hard to figure out, and I had the biggest trouble figuring out how to put something on something because I was bad at French (fortunately there are a lot of synonyms!).

The plot is that you are accompanying your master, a detective, to visit a monastery. You have to help him get in, then, the next day, solve a series of mysterious occurrences.

The game does take a pretty dramatic shift in what's possible in the very last act that surprised me, but the art for that part was also very nice. Overall, one of the more fun games I've played in a while.