Reviews by N. Cormier

This is a heavily styled kinetic experience about being obsessed with someone from afar.

Or at least, that's what it looks like at first. (Spoilers, and discussions of suicide.)

(Spoiler - click to show)Our anonymous narrator is obsessed with a girl named Elizabeth Flanagan, who has recently drowned in Lake Dioscuri. The first part of the game is set up to make you think that, jealous of perfect Elizabeth and her perfect girlfriend and perfect life, they drowned her - but (as the mythologically minded may have caught) their relationship is more complicated than that.

The Dioscuri is the collective term for the twin Greek gods Castor and Pollux – technically half-twins, as they share the same (mortal) mother but have different fathers (traditionally one mortal and one divine). They were the patron gods of sailors, with the power to rescue them from storms, and also associated with death and immortality. When Castor (the mortal twin) was mortally wounded, Pollux (the divine twin) gave up half his immortality to save him, leaving them both as half-divine and half-alive. (They were also really good at horseback riding, but I don’t think that’s thematically relevant here.)

All of this is resonant because it turns out that the narrator and Elizabeth are the same person, or at least parts of the same person. The narrator’s complicated relationship with Elizabeth is actually her complicated relationship with herself and with how the world sees her. The perfect and divine Elizabeth Flanagan that others see is constricting and artificial to the real, messy, decidedly mortal Elizabeth, and has created a relationship where everyone expects, everyone takes, but nobody gives or understands. Overwhelmed with the pressure, she throws herself (or at least the “divine” part of herself) into the waters of the lake, leaving the narrator as the mortal and real part of herself behind. The waters rescue her from herself, or at least that was the goal.

It’s unclear here (purposely) what the actual, literal outcome is here for Elizabeth and the unnamed narrator. (Is one or both of them a ghost? Did anyone actually die? How separate are they now?) But this is all in service of the metaphor and the message about growing up and being the person you want to be, and not the person the world wants you to be. Sometimes those two are radically different. If one is lucky you can grow from one to another, like coloring in someone else’s drawing on your own terms, but sometimes that’s not an option. Sometimes the person you are is so different from the person others want you to be that you have no choice but to take a chance and burst out of the cocoon, unrecognizable to those around you. Sometimes it feels like a death.

I can confirm, having been a closeted and obnoxiously overachieving teenage girl once upon a time – yeah, it’s like that.

Playing this back to back with Method in my Madness has also clarified some things for me about how I feel about kinetic experiences, and in particular what about them I’m looking for. I like kinetic VNs (which are full of art and voice acting to make up for the lack of interactivity), but I’ve struggled with some pieces of kinetic text IF where your only interaction is to click “next” to continue to the next chunk of text. What makes a kinetic game feel good (to me) and why? The answer seems to lie in what exactly the game is doing to take advantage of the medium. With more traditional IF the answer to that is “interactivity”, but with kinetic games I think the answer is “deliberate styling”.

take me to the lakes… is a visual novel in the sense that it has graphics and sound effects, but those are fairly minimal (as expected, given the author made it in 36 hours!!! I am impressed). The important thing about them is that they’re used to great effect. The sound effects and striking black-and-white styling add texture to the experience from the moment you start playing, and
the placement of text and choice of font on every slide is deliberate as to the feelings it wants to evoke in the player. There’s no timed text here but the text is doled out in small chunks with “click to continues” after each one, which helps add friction and deliberateness to a narrative that needs the player to slow down and consider what’s happening. (This is, I suspect, the effect that many authors playing around with timed text are actually going for so I’m taking notes.)

I’ve deviated from my typical review format here (as I do sometimes) because I don’t feel it appropriately fits this game. Some games are better suited to a ramble instead of a more structured review, I think? Anyway, to sum up my thoughts on take me to the lakes… now that I’ve written a review that is I’m pretty sure longer than the game itself:

WOW!

(Also, how did you do this in 36 hours?!)

What is it?
Method in My Madness is a Twine game written for the 2024 Neo-Twiny Jam as well as the 2024 REALLY BAD IF Jam. Games in the Neo-Twiny Jam must be 500 words or less, and games in the REALLY BAD IF Jam had to be, well, bad. MMM tells the story of a woman obsessed with her neighbor through her disjointed internal thoughts, which are represented by lines of text scattered and jumbled throughout each page. (I don’t think there’s a single HTML formatting option left out!)

What I Liked
I’m going to level with you: I don’t think this is “REALLY BAD”. I think this is actually pretty good! In fact, I’m going to say something I’ve never said before…

…I liked the timed text.

No, but really! I think the timed text and the chaotic formatting have allowed the author, by deliberately throwing all the rules out the window, to find an application where they actually work well. Usually timed text is used to try and create tension by an author who doesn’t trust their work, doesn’t trust the reader, or both, but here it IS the work. MMM portrays a narrator who is desperate, chaotic, and unsure of herself in 500 words or less – no small task – and the various formatting choices do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting it across.

Suggestions
Of course, chaotic formatting and timed text is a give and take with the reader, and this did require some patience to see through to the end. Given its aforementioned inclusion into the REALLY BAD IF Jam a lot of this was probably deliberate! But since picking through authorial intent is generally a fool’s errand I’m going to list out the changes I would make to turn this into a “REALLY GOOD” piece of IF.

-I am afraid I don’t know what a “Cauchy” is? I assume it’s the name of the narrator’s target but it’s not a name I’m familiar with. This could absolutely be a me problem, since culture is going to have a big impact on what names any particular person is familiar with, but something more legible to the average English speaker might be a better choice here.
-The formatting and overlapping text was always going to be a nightmare (on purpose) but on my monitor some of the later links to continue were buried under other text and hard to click on (since the “top” text takes priority regardless of the presence of links). Definitely keep link text on the top unless you’re very sure there’s nothing else near it on any size monitor.
-Some of the longer pauses could be replaced by a click to continue without sacrificing anything but avoiding the user thinking the game broke.

Overall Thoughts
Rules are made to be broken, and I think this game is a fantastic example of why. Don’t use timed text in your games – unless it’s as thoughtful and deliberate as in MMM.

What Is This?

Larvae is a choice-based game starring Isla and Cameron, two recently-graduated college sweethearts. Isla is a biology nerd who’s just received an invitation to a month-long biology camp where all the field’s greatest projects will be on display! Cam is a streamer, so while he’s not terribly interested in biology he’s happy to tag along and show his followers cool stuff. Especially those parasitic worms…

What I Liked

First of all, this game’s settings menu should be standard for everyone going forward and personally speaking, I’m taking notes. A music volume slider, spacing options, plus the ability to change font AND font size? I’m in heaven. If this had a light mode option it would be perfect. (For me. I can’t speak to anyone else’s accessibility needs, of course.)

Secondly, I just really like this game! It’s a nice little blend of romance and horror – it’s not a spoiler to say that the weird larvae in the title are going to do SOMETHING unpleasant, but the relationship between the title characters gets just as much focus. Both elements are well executed, with Cam and Isla feeling like well rounded characters with a very sweet and believable relationship despite the short length of the game. And the horror, well… I’ll leave that up to the reader, but I certainly found it terrifying!

This game also does some interesting playing around with genre and perspective, which I can't discuss without spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
First of all: Genre. This is a romantic game, but whether or not the horror comes into play entirely depends on the choices of the player. The game pretty clearly signposts that drinking from the creepy water glass is a bad idea (at least if you’re playing Cam’s route first), and if you avoid doing so the game is just a cute little story about two people at a summer camp. I’ve always seen a lot of discussion about “genre savvy” in horror, i.e. that a lot of horror stories only work because the protagonists don’t know they’re in a horror story. And if they did, they’d make different choices, and it wouldn’t be horrifying at all! But since this is a horror game, the author has given us, the player, the choice to be genre savvy – at the expense of not getting the horror, which is undoubtedly what most people are here for! I think this is a great way to play around with interactivity and genre expectations. (Of course, this could all be unintentional and the goal was to make the horror hinge on a single innocuous choice, which is also horrifying! I may personally be too genre savvy for my own good, but I like that it works even if you can spot the hints beforehand.)

Secondly: perspective. As I mentioned earlier, you can play out the events of the game through the eyes of both Cam and Isla. This doesn’t change the actual events – the horror/not horror choice is present in both, and events will play out the same way if you make the same choice. The big difference here is that the change of perspective subtly changes the type of horror in play here, which I think is pretty neat!

If you’re Cam and you drink the creepy water, you’re treated to a nasty but straightforward body horror story. If you’re Isla, it’s still a body horror story but it’s much less straightforward. The horror choice is pretty well obfuscated in her route, so from her perspective she sees her partner gradually and then suddenly become strange and ill in a way she has no control over. I think the shift in perspective and the different framing of Cam’s issues that comes with it is very effective and helps keep things interesting, especially since large chunks of dialog don’t change between perspectives. Things got a little more repetitive on the not-horror routes from both perspectives, but given that this is clearly signposted as a horror game I didn’t mind all that much.

What Could Use Improvement?

Mostly, I think this needs a good round of polish. There’s a broken image link in the upper left corner, and there’s a few passages with no links out. I think they may be endings, but if so there’s no text indicating that’s the case.

I also believe the author is ESL so there’s some language issues that could be cleaned up if they got some editing help from a native speaker. This was honestly not a big deal and didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game, but I thought I’d mention it as I know there’s many people on this forum who are willing to help out. Not many people know about that, and editing help can be hard to find elsewhere, so I try to plug this whenever I can!

A Collegial Conversation is a game written for SeedComp 2024. The author is using the “1 link = 1 viewpoint” seed, which is exactly what’s written on the tin. You are given a selection of characters and their partners all involved in a spat at a workplace social event, and instead of choosing how the conversation flows you jump from POV to POV as it plays out along a pre-determined path. It’s a well-written and well-styled game, with a different gorgeous color palette for each POV character.

A Collegial Conversation is trying something very ambitious here in a relatively small space. This means in short succession we’re introduced to the setting (a party for government officials in Zelio, which is presumably a secondary world of the author’s creation), four characters, and the complicated history between them. Despite the helpful dramatis personae (linked on every page) I still found myself constantly lost in the shifting POVs. It also doesn’t help that characters are referred to by solely their first or last name depending on the POV, which makes in-character sense but doubles the number of names to keep track of. I had a much better time after reaching the end once I unlocked the ability to follow any given character through the full conversation. Overall I think this is executed as well as is possible given the inherent chaos of the seed, but a less involved setting may have been a better fit. Of note, I know the author has written other works in this setting so it may be easier to follow ACC if you play some of them first.

Also, a nitpick - the game doesn’t default to fullscreen and when smushed into the smaller box this text formatting will get wonky in some passages (in particular, Seira’s at the end). I believe there’s a setting on Itch somewhere to force it to display in fullscreen which should fix this.

What is this?

Collision is a game written for the Neo-Twiny Jam, with the attendant restriction of using 500 words or less. The conceit is that you wake up in an unfamiliar space, in a perilous situation, and the player must figure out what’s going on and then try to save our protagonist the crash test dummy from their inevitable fate. (Based on other reviews I figured this out more quickly than average, possibly due to my teenaged obsession with Mythbusters.)

What I Liked

The word limit is used to great effect here – all descriptions are given in two-word pairs, which contributes to an overall surreal feeling and heightens the protagonist’s lack of control. You have many actions available to you to try and get out of your predicament, most of which give you more information about your environment, but as far as I can tell every run will end in failure with the protagonist doomed (because they are a crash test dummy and can’t move). There may be a solution to the puzzle that I couldn’t find, but even without that I think this works well as a work of existential horror. It’s very atmospheric, and makes the absolute most of its word count.

What could use improvement?

If I had to make a suggestion, I’d add a toggle or slider for the timed text. It’s effective on the first few plays but after that it gets in the way of exploring all the options.

What is this?

Codex Crusade is a surreal Twine romp taking place at the University of Turin, Georgia (not the other one). Due to shenanigans involving the other Turin your library has recently come into possession of a large number of rare books, and of course not everyone’s happy about it. You, the librarian’s assistant intern, have been tasked to descend into the depths of the university and retrieve this tome – what could go wrong?

Codex Crusade is set up much like a traditional parser game; you can explore spaces (although without the usual cardinal directions), add items to your inventory, and use said items to solve puzzles. The whole thing is dressed up with comic academic theming, which I found entertaining despite the fact that I can tell a lot of it is going over my head. (If you have a background in philosophy or medieval studies I suspect this game is hysterical.)

Unfortunately, I ran into a showstopping bug fairly early on. I have the wrong item in my inventory for a puzzle and I can’t seem to get rid of it, but the game won’t let me pick up the right item until the Doritos are gone. I’ll come back to this later, maybe – per Mathbrush’s review it looks like it’s possible to finish the game, so if I get that puzzle right on the first try I should be able to advance. But for now I’m going to put it down and move on. But even with this bug it’s a fun and witty game, and proof that the comic-puzzler-parser model does not in fact have to be a parser game.

What is this?

In A Mouse Speaks to Death, you’re a mouse at the end of your life. Death has come for you, but before you go he asks you to reminisce about the life you led. From there you go through several rounds of choosing a memory to experience (from a group of three available, all randomly selected from a bigger pool) and then playing through it. Each memory is a self-contained storylet with branching choices, so you if the cards are in your favor you can play through any given one multiple times to “remember” it differently.

The overall result is a slice-of-life (or to be more accurate, several small slices of life) of what it’s like to be a mouse in the author’s rodent world. The mice farm, hunt, live, love, gather, experiment, and die all under the feet of the mysterious Eaters (i.e., us) and the player can focus on what interests them the most.

What did I like?

This work is part of a greater universe that the author has written and that I’m not familiar with. I’m always nervous when approaching games like this because making them independently accessible to a newbie is a real challenge – trust me, I would know! So I’m happy to report that AMST pulls this off flawlessly. The world of the mice is a fascinating echo of ours high above, but just different enough to feel new and exciting. The vignettes frequently focus on something new and exciting to our mouse, thus giving them a perfect excuse to explain them to our player. Sometimes these things are basic parts of mousedom that they encounter for the first time growing up, and sometimes they’re more unusual experiences like finding human artefacts, but no two are alike and there’s always joy in seeing something new. I didn’t find myself repeating storylets because I was much more curious about both this world and about the life of our hero.

Also, I couldn’t bring myself to click on any of the obviously signposted negative outcomes for our player mouse, so clearly 1) I was engaged from the word go and 2) I am a huge weenie.

What could use improvement?

There’s no counter telling you how many stories you get to go through, and by about 2/3 through I started to both get confused (should I be doing something to advance besides looking at storylets?) and also they started to wear out their welcome. A visible turn counter, an option to end your reminiscence early, or just a lower turn limit would have been a great help here. The storylet variety also wasn’t great enough to support the number of turns you get unless you’re interested in replaying them, which (as above) I wasn’t. There was also an issue where you could get duplicates of the same storylet in the same turn, thus cutting down your available options

Other thoughts

I see you, fellow Terry Pratchett fan! I love the Death of Rats so this was a real treat.

Conclusion

This was a real treat, and a great game to start off the Review-a-thon. I hope this is a good indicator of what’s to come!

The Spectators is a game set in 16th-century Italy, and stars a cast of characters (mostly servants) going about their duties while observing the decline of the relationship between the jealous Duke and his new naive bride the Duchess. Each character’s chapter follows roughly the same arc: they need to do a task as part of their job, but they have something else that they desperately want to do. The puzzles all revolve around trying to fit said task in without detection by other staff (and therefore avoiding the harsh punishment that would come with it). While going about these tasks, each character gets another look at the Duchess’s life and the Duke’s controlling relationship with her, all the way to its inevitable end. This description falls short as it makes things sound much more repetitive than they are - the characters are rich and varied, as are the puzzles they need to solve, and I never felt bored. Even though we spent only a little time with each character I felt invested in each of them and their desires (even, in the case of one particular character, that investment is shown by disliking her intensely).

The player character writing here, I have to point out, is good but not too good. What I mean by this, of course, is that while I was fascinated with all of the PCs, none of them overshadow the story of the Duke and the Duchess. The Duchess is the center of the game and is the axis about which the plot spins around - catering to her and interacting with her shapes most of the servants’ days, and form the tasks that conflict with their own desires. While we never get to see the world through her eyes, we get an idea of the kind of woman (or girl, really) she is, and the shape of the Duke’s conflict with her. He’s not seen as much but his presence looms large over the entire castle. Whenever he makes an appearance on screen the story tension goes up a notch. The pacing of the story is superb as well, with the rising tension lasting exactly as long as it needs to before coming to a horrifying climax.

There’s a number of other touches to this game that I loved as well, particularly the attention to detail. The author has clearly done her research about the setting, both about the poem the game is adapted from and the real history behind the poem itself. I love all the little details, especially all the ones that turn out to be true (I had no idea dial locks were invented that early!). This extra effort made the whole game a delight from start to finish.

Finally, some spoiler discussion: I was not previously aware of the poem My Last Duchess, which this game is an adaptation of. I am fascinated by the general idea of IF adaptations of works, and in particular by the way this work pulled it off. It’s almost entirely written from whole cloth, but it follows the beats of the poem faithfully and is, in my opinion, an excellent adaptation.

God is in the Radio is a short visual novel made in Ren’Py, and with its heavy emphasis on the visual side stands out from the crowd. (This is no mean feat given the number of high-quality games in this year’s Ectocomp!) The story focuses on an unnamed cult centered around the Major Arcana of the Tarot, who have just been told by their High Priestess that they can hear a message from God of they complete a ritual involving a radio. The plot is mostly on rails, with the protagonist Death being given a few choices to decide how they feel or react to the whole ritual situation - these won’t change things immediately, but will affect what ending you get.

Despite the relative lack of interactivity, I had no trouble staying engaged with the plot. Part of this is because the story is well-written and well-paced, with tension slowly rising at every step. The other part is due to some kind of writing wizardry, because there are 22(!!!) characters including the protagonist - one for every Major Arcana in the Tarot. They all have unique portraits and uniquely defined characterization, and somehow despite being a short game with this many characters it doesn’t feel overstuffed. Mostly I think this is because the full cast only participates in the ritual, with a more limited number being part of the rising tension beforehand. Even with that it would be easy for the ritual portion to outstay its welcome so I am deeply impressed.

My only gripe with this game is how the endings are managed - the three choices are spread out throughout the game, and as far as I can tell different choices won’t change anything until you get a different ending. Because of this I wasn’t motivated to play through again in the hope of seeing the other endings (I got ending 2), but I don’t think this is necessarily a flaw in the game, per se. Most VNs I’ve played are like this (i.e. with long sections of non-interactive text between choices) but most of them make up for it by allowing you to skip text you’ve already seen, effectively fast-forwarding you to important choices and/or new content. God is in the Radio was written in four and a half hours and is a phenomenal game given that restriction, but I think it could be elevated further if the author implemented a similar feature.

This is a quick but surprisingly deep (heh) Twine game about trying to survive a hurricane in your attic. There’s only one puzzle (concerning what to do when the waters rise too far), but there’s plenty to see. While I’ve luckily never had any similar personal experiences, I didn’t mind too much because it makes sense. How many puzzles can you solve trapped in an attic? Instead, most of the game focuses on passing the time while you wait out the storm. Incidentally (and appropriately for Ectocomp) there is a whole lot of supernatural freaky stuff happening, but also a decent amount of regular weird stuff that comes along with your town flooding to the rafters. The regular-weird and supernatural-weird blend together nicely against the surreal natural disaster backdrop, helped out by the protagonist’s commentary.

This is an excellent little game full of mood and vibes, and it kept me playing until I ran out of endings. Great job!