This is essentially the moral of this short horror game, as answering the messages will send you into very wild conversations. Depending on your answers, you may find someone accusing you of stalking, someone informing they have kidnapped your brother, someone threatening you to kill you…
It reminded me of Please Answer Carefully …
In May of 1998 1 , riots erupted in Jakarta, resulting in of the diaspora of Chinese Indonesians towards, among others, Australia. This is an important context to understand the situation of the main character and her family.
As the broken family settles in their new home, a strange dynamic forms, leaving the main character in a sort of emotional limbo state, avoiding acts that could tip the balance of this fragile situation the wrong way.
It is heartbreaking.
Eat, sleep, drink some water, clean yourself, and look for your human. This is the sweet, sweet, life that Puck, the cute little rat, lives. Though it might feel quickly monotonous - there is only so much a rodent can do - the game invites you to try different combinations of actions to fill in the achievement list. A really cute game indeed!
In a mix between retrospection and conversation, this entry shows that no matter how dull work can be, a friend can make up for it. Even if you never met face to face. Or their handle changes every day. But nothing matter in this corrupted document shared with that one special person, who you know so much of and yet so little.
I like the eeriness of the setting (what if they are not as friendly? what if you are being tricked) and the writing made me chuckle too. The UI also was spot on!
While this could be a metaphor for how grueling and monotonous life could be, this entry takes instead inspiration from a familiar Greek myth. Forced to complete this Sysiphian task, memories from a former life, a previous time, start to pique your mind. You slowly uncover the mystery, pushing the boulder, again, and again, fighting the pull of the great stone or complying to its wished.
Really good!
This whimsical entry, filled with dreamy illustrations, awards you three gifts, which you must choose from 11, to lessen the hardship of life. From doors to other worlds, food you can pay with memories, a pool with always the perfect temperature, to a literal slice of paradise, the hardest thing in this entry is both choose… and realise this will never happen in real life.
But one can dream…
In this small puzzle-y entry, you are faced with a tomb (which you may or may not manage to enter) and the memories of the man buried there. Memories you thought you buried as well…
I liked the puzzle quite a bit~
While working on samples, you notice strange things happening around you: misplaced test tubes, foul smell, unusual behaviour… Depending on the choice you’ve made, you may encounter one of four endings, each creepier than the last.
The entry is very atmospheric and the bareness in writing (in work notes) convey a lot more about the setting than it looks.
Really enjoyed this one!
While you can skip the typed text animation, the options are stuck being a timed, making you wait anyway. Changing the timed into a typed would be much nicer for replay value!
This short entry looks at the early stages of the lifecycle of a frog, from the moment they are spawned into the pond, to the day they leave it. You play as one of them, eating, wondering about your state, or wiggling around the muddy waters. As you grow, the season changes, and so are the dangers.
The entry is awfully sweet and delightful.
With the current ecological state of the world, it is hard not to feel hopeless for future generations. It is also quite normal to turn towards science/speculative-fiction to imagine a world in the far future where Nature has taken a priority, and technology can do wonders to protect it. Like a soothing balm, reminding us that things might work out after all…
This is this kind of hope that this entry is bringing forward.