Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

It's a ~5,000-word non interactive poem, with just a handful of words per line, across 1,742 lines.

The POV character is depressed, and finds day-to-day life pointless and meaningless. I felt like it made its point in the first 1,000 words.

The puzzles are pure self-contained puzzles, mostly word puzzles, mostly unconnected to the theme/story. The story is cute. We played it in a group and the SF IF Meetup, and we had a good time with it.

Be sure to play the Vorple version on the author's website, which includes fun font stuff and color changes.

This game was developed under time crunch as part of the IronCHIF competition. The prompt was "a scroll that alters the world around it." This game has that! And a ton of puzzles to solve. Puzzles interwoven on top of other puzzles.

My only complaint is the mechanic at the end game.

It's a "kinetic novel," where you don't make any choices. (You can click "auto" to make the game autoplay, revealing the text without human interaction.)

That's fine, but the art feels like it's stuff pulled off of Google image search, and blurred so it wouldn't be obviously out of place in this game.

In a kinetic novel, the art needs to support the text, and I feel like the art is just there because the author felt like "there ought to be art here."

It's a fresh take on vampires, which is impressive in its own right.

It has no plot choices, but it still relies on interactivity, with cycling links that affect your viewpoint of the story, and a bunch of optional links to explore side notes. It feels like you're driving, even if the story is on rails.

This game credits no author or artist. According to my browser devtools, the AI chatbot conversation is happening with an actual live LLM (Grok 4.1, from xAI / Elon Musk), but I don't think that was necessary at all for the trivial interactions you have with the bot.

I believe the art is AI generated as well, but, with no credits, I can't prove it.

The game includes one actual choice, but there's no real difference in the three endings. If you crack down on the politician, does he go to jail? Does he make us suffer? It all ends in same scene on the couch in your apartment, which makes the choice feel less important.

This is a game where winning the game requires examining objects in the scenery that may not seem very notable at first.

Once you finish examining and searching everything, the puzzles are fun and fair, and the game is written well.

Good music, solid story.