Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

I enjoyed this Choice of Games story. You play as the child of a former god. Her followers deposed her and stole her power, and she had to flee to a cave where she has raised you for the last few decades.

Now you have the chance to go back and restore her to power. But when you arrive at the big city, you discover the world is larger than you knew. There are many factions in play, and who gets power is up to you.

This game felt about 50/50 between 'cool magic stuff' and 'underhanded politics'. In the first category, you have things like collecting magic shards, blasting people with lightning, seeking immortality, learning the magic of the city itself, and dealing with your incredibly powerful mother.

The second category has things like siding with the cops, rebels and criminals, or current city leaders; running for election; dealing with the press; courting the favour of elected officials; and so on.

To me it felt like a weighty, rich game, and I'd play a chapter or two and let it sit in my mind for a few days. It's pretty long (at least if you take the time to think your choices through like I did).

I've only played once, so I don't know for sure how viable different paths are, but I had the impression that there was tons of variability. I played as a vengeful zealot who was completely committed to my tyrant mother and wanted her to come and destroy everyone. I always had options, which was nice. I also played as aro-ace which I regretted later on as there was a great romantic interest I wanted to pursue.

Definitely recommended for anyone who likes either of the themes (gaining powerful magic or navigating complex politics).

This game was apparently the tutorial game in Aaron Reed's book on writing games in Inform 7, which is pretty neat.

It features a disaffected native American youth who is having school, family, and girl problems and ends up blacking out and driving fifteen miles off the road and into the desert. When you crash, you find that bad weather is coming, and you have to figure out how to either keep safe or get back.

The game has a lot of symbolic/bizarre scenes as well as a spooky abandoned place to explore.

It's completely believable that this is a tutorial game, as it shows off a wide variety of Inform tools (such as things that can be opened or closed or pushed or pulled, smelling, darkness, listening, hidden objects, conversation, etc.). Speaking of conversation, it uses 'suggested topics' which it seems was controversial when the first reviews came out but is now pretty common and generally accepted (such as in Counterfeit Monkey).

Others have pointed out that the polish is a little thing when it comes to custom responses or synonyms. I do generally dislike this in games but as a tutorial game it makes sense; you don't want to overwhelm a new author with the immense amount of custom declarations you need to make to make a game 100% polished.

I liked the storyline overall. I don't see too many Native American IF stories, and while the author doesn't seem to be (?? maybe I'm making assumptions here) firmly rooted in that culture, neither does our protagonist, who specifically struggles with being placed in between three or four different kinds of culture and tradition. I liked this, and I'm glad it was recommended for the Player's choice tournament.