Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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I couldn't solve this game without running a Z-Code disassembler to figure out what to do next. Progressing the game feels like a game of guessing what the author was thinking. (Luckily, wait often works, but not at the beginning, or at the end.)
But the words of the game are poetic. The vibes are strong with this one.
It's a four-room game, and it's buggy. You'll go downstairs to kill an orc, but once you kill the orc, the room contains "an orc and a dead orc."
(It's cool that the game was co-developed with a child, but entering it in the IFComp makes it a subject of judgment from adults. My feedback below is directed toward Clyde, and not Alana.)
No playtesters are credited; I think there may not have been any testers for this game. Playtesting your game and crediting your testers is the #1 guideline for IFComp authors.
Furthermore, as I write this, the authors have incorrectly listed their game as "Browser based" on the IFComp site, instead of "Glulx, using Inform's 'Release with a website' feature" which is what the authors actually made. That's a bummer, because it means that IFComp won't send transcripts to the authors, which might help them find bugs.
When you find the orc, he's in a cage, but, for some reason, you can't attack him while he's in the cage, even though you have a sword. You have to unlock the cage, allowing him to attack you, in order to attack him.
When you do attack him, the game includes an RPG-like combat system, in which you type attack orc over and over until he dies. In my opinion, combat systems should give the player some tactical options, or there's no point in having them. Let the player make some risk/reward tradeoffs at least.
There's no alternative to fighting the orc; the orc attacks you mindlessly. (Orcs as monsters reflect an uncritical attitude to the idea that there are "evil races". Another monster, one that isn't steeped in a history of racism, would have been a better choice.)
In my opinion, the solution to leave the East Basement is unfair. (Spoiler - click to show)When you enter the East Basement, the stairs retract into the ceiling. To bring them back, you have to examine stairs, even though the stairs are no longer described in the room. When you examine stairs, the game says, "There are no stairs here. There is a small keyhole beside where the staircase once was." Everything that the player needs to examine should be described in the room's description, or revealed by examining objects in the room's description. I had to use glulx-strings to even figure this out.
Other than the fight with the orc, the game is nothing more than opening containers, taking keys of various colors, and unlocking things with those keys.
In my opinion, games with puzzles need to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. None of the puzzles in this game rise to meet that bar, not even for other children, in my opinion.
Overall, the game seems to have been developed with a sense of "this is just what would/should happen in a traditional dungeon crawl."
To add some depth, (perhaps in your next game,) ask Alana what's happening in the game and why.
- Why is there an orc in this game?
- What's fun about fighting games, and how can you put that fun in your game?
- Who made this dungeon? Who put these keys and these locks and these chests here? (Who put a golden key around the neck of a caged orc? Why did they do that?)
- How do you want players to feel as they're playing the game?
It's a portal fantasy about following your dreams. It seemed pretty complete to me, not really an "intro" at all, but it's hard to criticize it for that.
I first got Ending B, a "mixed" ending. Getting Ending A only took another 5 minutes or so. (Spoiler - click to show)There's a secret ending you can unlock by exploring the library and using the book.
The game includes a lot of right/wrong choices, where if you do something "reasonable" like listen to your doctors, the game immediately ends, and you have to go back and pick the other option. I feel like the game wants to create the feeling of interactivity, while minimizing any actual forking.
I think it's better to do as the game did early on, where you can choose a bunch of options, some of which would appear to avoid the plot, but they all lead back to the same chokepoint.
Like, maybe instead of insta-dying in the hospital after weeks of treatment, include a scene where you realize you have to escape the hospital.
Also! If you're going to have multiple endings, the game needs a "Restart" button. (I had to clear my cookies to restart the game.)
This is a maze-like Twine, where you're meant to explore all the endings. But one of the endings, the ending that seems most likely to lead to a decent-ish outcome for the main character, ends in a Twine error message:
There isn't a temp variable named _E in this place.
Temp variables only exist inside the same passage, hook, or lambda in which they're created.
As for what's here, the main character is often confused, and writes/thinks in a confusing way, making it unclear when big gaps of time are elapsing, what's happening right now in play vs. what's already happened, or what's at stake for the main character. (In many of the endings, you select the option to do nothing and die, because the main character's life is meaningless.)
I can't tell whether the author intended this to be confusing (the error message inspires little confidence).
Maybe with that bug fixed I'd have a better sense of what the author intended.
You click the "Receive next signal" button and you get a short little poem in the format of a status update. You click "Receive next signal" 40 times to access all 40 "signals."
You can, at any time, click "Attempt time transfer," to archive(?) up to 10 times. But archiving signals doesn't seem to do anything that I can identify; it doesn't seem to matter when/whether you click the button.
I do at times really enjoy short kinetic poetry, but this didn't really connect with me; I don't think it sustain my attention if it were, like, 400 signals or 4,000 signals. There would need to be something else to do.
The UI looks cool, anyway!
(Be sure to press the "Restart" button as the game starts, so you can hear the background music.)
This intro is approximately five minutes long. It's a censorship simulator, kinda like The Westport Independent.
The core gameplay loop is picking True (approved) or False (censored), where each option has a certain percentage chance of "success." But you only get to make one example True/False decision, and one real one, before the game ends.
Right at the end, it implies that getting more "successes" will unlock higher access levels, but you never get a chance to actually level up, or even to directly see what's at stake if you do/don't level up.
The author is Yoon Ha Lee. I'm a fan of his Machineries of Empires series of sci-fi novels, in which adherence to a calendar system (supported by violent rituals called "rememberences") unlocks magic-tech powers. In this setting, maintaining the calendar requires ideological control, which is constantly under threat from "calendrical heresy."
A censorship simulator in Machineries of Empires sounds pretty cool! But none of that is actually here in the intro we have.
Indeed, there's so little here that it's hard to evaluate it at all. Will it work as a game? Does it need a lot more gameplay than just the True/False censorship game loop? There's just not enough here to prove the concept.
This game is full of surrealism. It's an open question from the start of the game to the end of the game whether the whole thing is a hallucination. Stuff is minimally described, leaving a lot to my imagination.
I have very minimal understanding of who/what the player character is, but I have a pretty strong sense of how they feel, which is certainly something, but I'm struggling to connect with the character under the circumstances.
Lots of unskippable timed text, which I don't usually love. The timed text is synchronized with background sound effects and music, which is cool. Still, I'm not sure that timed text was needed for that.
(And it doesn't help that the game often leaves it ambiguous whether I'm waiting for timed text or whether I'm supposed to press a key to continue.)
The game's default behavior in response to invalid commands is to print a blank line, with no error message, which sucks a lot. Error messages are the perfect time to provide clues to the player. Like when (Spoiler - click to show)I entered the wrong ID number, because I needed to omit leading zeroes, it could have told me "invalid ID number" or something.
(I played the game on a Mac in Quest Viva.)
It's a small maze to figure out how to sell all of your cookies. The back button helps.
The writing is charming, but if it's the start of something bigger, I can't see what it could be. The story seems to be entirely tied up.
Solid database search game, August 10, 2026It's a nice little database search game. Decent puzzles in a nostalgic format. I never got too stuck for long.
It's a bummer that it only works on Windows and Linux. (I'm pretty sure Godot can export to HTML.) I played the game in a Windows emulator.
The Incident at Galley House is a much more approachable game than Type Help. You probably won't get too stuck right at the start of Incident, as many players got stuck in Type Help, unable to figure out how to get started. Many players of Type Help didn't realize that they needed to take careful notes and essentially build out a spreadsheet. In Incident, you don't have to do that, because the game automatically tracks everything in its own spreadsheet. And Incident is graphical, most of its presentation in a visual-novel format. Nobody will be put off from Incident by virtue of the game being all text. You can play Incident with a standard game controller, using a "machine" (a UI toy). Type Help is best played with a keyboard and mouse.
That's all well and good, I suppose. (I found the "machine" more annoying to operate than Type Help, even/especially when I did have a mouse; the time-code dial is too finicky for my taste.)
But I mostly want to talk about the frame story, the story around the story of the game.
The main core story of Incident is word-for-word exactly the same as Type Help. Talking about what's changed, especially in the frame story, requires giant spoilers, for both Type Help AND Incident.
Before I begin that discussion, I want to mention a mild spoiler about Type Help, something you may not have entirely uncovered even if you "won" Type Help, involving @, who provides commentary throughout the game.
Read this first: (Spoiler - click to show)If you've won Type Help, you unlocked 00-final-note, but there's there's another secret 00 file to unlock, with another hidden secret in it. You can use my hint guide to find it, if you haven't already.
And now, major spoilers for Type Help.
(Spoiler - click to show)The core twist of Type Help and Incident is the thunderclap.
When someone dies by thunderclap, almost everyone completely forgets that the dead person ever existed. Everyone's minds fill in the gaps with plausible details (as plausible as possible), and they tend to avoid thinking too hard about the gaps that are really inexplicable.
But, inevitably, someone will remember the person who most recently died, and then their memories all come flooding back (including remembering that they didn't remember the person briefly, which is usually pretty upsetting in its own right). Whoever remembers the previously dead person will die by thunderclap a few minutes later, making a "chain" of people.
(It's never revealed in the story why the thunderclaps happen, or how they work; the characters call it a "curse." It certainly seems supernatural.)
The curse makes it difficult for characters inside the story to reason out what's happening, and, in the structure of the game, it makes it more difficult for the player to logic out what happened. The player naturally assumes that if John knows something at 06, he will continue to know it at time 07; if he says that he doesn't know something, the player assumes that John must be lying to cover up a secret.
In Type Help, this ties back to the frame story of @, the previous owner of the laptop that you're exploring. @ is lonely. @ has no friends, no family, nobody who cares about him, and in 00-final-note, @ has come to realize what has happened to him and why. Someone (a commanding officer, perhaps) must have assigned @ the job precisely because @ has no one in the world who cares about him.
@'s loneliness manifests in @ behaving in all sorts of weird and creepy ways. He puts all sorts of weird personal emotional stuff in his commentary, because he has no one to talk to, no one to tell it to except these notes.
The most glaringly creepy is the hangman game with no "correct" letters, inevitably ending in an ASCII drawing of a hanged man, with the message, "You did your job. The world is safer now."
But surely the creepiest of all is the hidden file 00-dream, which you can only find by guessing the file based on his mentioning "the dead bodies strewn about like in that terrifying dream I mentioned" in 21-CH-3.
00-dream does not describe dead bodies strewn about; it simply includes the lyrics of Because of You by Lee Sims, and its player piano code "43092". You can use that to find the YouTube version of the player-piano playing the song, a cheerful, upbeat tune.
Self-playing "player pianos" are inherently creepy in their own right. The keys are moving as if the piano is being played by a ghost. They're often not tuned perfectly, creating an eerie dissonance in their performance. Secret player pianos figure regularly in parlor-room murder mysteries, where the characters wrongly assume that if the piano was playing, someone must have been playing it, when, in fact, the piano was playing itself.
And there's something kinda sad and lonely about player pianos. You're listening to a machine mechanically perform a piano piece, instead of making a real connection to the performer and their performance.
Furthermore, @ has hidden a secret in 00-dream: he's italicized some of the letters. If you transcribe them, they spell out iaMricHaRDloNglEY. Once you realize, as the player, what you're doing, you've realized that you've doomed yourself. Now you remember Richard Longley. Now you are the next person to die in the chain, and perhaps countless others will die after you because of it. You could have stopped once you'd spelled out iamrichar, but you just couldn't help yourself, could you? You just had to know, and now look what you've done?!
In Incident, the frame story has completely changed.
(Spoiler - click to show)In Incident, you start at the front door of Galley House; the door is locked. You read the newspaper, and the door is unlocked. Inside, there's a note on the machine, and then there isn't, and then there's a new note. Whenever you look away from the machine (to crank the generator), something has changed.
As it unfolds, you discover that your character, Reya, arrived at Galley House with a bunch of people. The door didn't unlock itself. The other people unlocked it. But then they got thunderclapped, one by one, and so the game plays out from the thunderclapped perspective, notes magically appearing on the machine that were, in fact, directly handed to you by people you can no longer remember.
A nifty premise! But… there's something implausible about it, especially the scan of the "Prototype Machine" in the evidence. When you first look at that scan, there's no one in that photo at all. Then, when you discover scenes involving Sam Moors, he starts appearing in the photo, when he wasn't there before.
Then, later, when you discover Ervin Dolsky, he doesn't just appear in the photo; he also suddenly starts appearing in the machine. Scenes where he didn't appear, suddenly he does appear. This leads you to discover that he's intentionally chaining people together to try to clean up all the loose ends, ending with himself.
This makes no sense; that's not how the curse works. The thunderclap doesn't force people ignore physical evidence of the person's existence. Martha saw photos of her husband, and saw him in those photos. (If it forced people to ignore physical evidence, they'd presumably have to ignore the handed-off notes themselves.)
After discovering (and presumably remembering) Ervin, Reya doesn't then die. Reya sets the house on fire, permanently ending the chain. The Incident at Galley House has a melancholy but hopeful ending. Perhaps now, the entire chain has truly been put to rest.
Ervin Dolsky is sort of a creepy loner, but he's not alone; he's a a murderer who has several friends and colleagues, and he kills them one by one to save the world. He gives a tragic but villainous suicidal monologue in his final scene.
The theme of Richard's true loneliness, of the ineffectual creepiness that his loneliness inspires in him, is completely gone. Ervin accomplishes all of his goals. Richard accomplished nothing, not even saving the world, because we went digging through his laptop.
Playing Type Help feels like being Richard Longley. Playing Incident doesn't feel like being Reya.
Creepy horror stories end with a surprising but inevitable twist that the horror is still out there. Type Help does that; Incident doesn't.
In conclusion, Incident is still very good, but almost everything good about it comes from Type Help.
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