Reviews by manonamora

The Yard is a short piece made in Unity where you play as a dog trapped in a yard. Not well treated by your owner (made best obvious by your visual condition), you are left with three different actions: bark at passers-by or to get your owner’s attention, whine, or wiggle your tail. After some time (number of action), the game will trigger an ending. There are supposedly 3 endings, I think I only found one.

There are some little issues with the formatting of the game, with the text covering the whole screen in a way that you can’t read everything, making the (Re)Play button disappear. I am also not quite sure how to trigger any of the other endings either (I’ve tried doing just one kind of action, mixes of both, etc… it seems to always end the same way).

But really, it’s honestly super sad… You feel hopeless while playing the game, at the mercy of your owner and passers-by who seemingly do nothing for you. And the greyscale interface really adds to that depressing vibe.

The Pit is a text-only story made in Ren’Py, where you wake up inside a pit, not remembering how you got there or why your whole body hurt. Stuck, with nowhere to go, you try your best to assess your state or try to recall anything that could have led you in this situation. Later on, you can even explore a bit.

Though there isn’t much you can do to save yourself, the interesting bit in this entry is trying to figure out what happened to you. Especially in Chapter 1, you are given quite a bit of options to explore this mystery. Except you are limited in your choices (3-4, I think?) before the story moves on. You only get bits and pieces at a time, never truly see the whole picture.

Pretty creepy.

Elysium is an almost kinetic-like entry with only two choices available to you, and one only truly affecting the ending (of which there are two). You are a fallen warrior gifted an eternity in paradise – of which you do not believe to be worthy. Violent snippets of your deeds haunt your mind, as you struggle with the disconnect between recompensed actions and motivations behind those actions.

There are many heroes that came to mind while reading this entry (which affected my choice of pronouns for your lover, who dies before you), as Greek Mythology can be pretty violent and bloody… But I’m glad our identity was kept a secret, so I could fill in who I wanted it to be. (FINE I PICKED (Spoiler - click to show)ACHILLES AND PATROCLUS OK)

I would have wished to be able to let our conundrum stew a bit longer before making the final choice, but this was a last-minute entry, so I can’t fault the author for keeping it short.

It was neat.