Ratings and 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!