Reviews by manonamora
seedcomp
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Not so hidden secrets, April 2, 2024Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets is a Twine game set in a Discord server, where members of the Hidden Gems Of Poetry Group interact, led by Dr. Cornelius Harper, a retired professor with a passion for poetry. Prior to the creation of this space, each member had some sort of connection with Cornelius (who calls himself Corn), many seeing him as a mentor. The server is also moderated by his trans grandson.
But on that day, two collisions shock the group: a literal one, leaving the life of Cornelius in the balance waiting for surgery, and a more metaphorical one as a secret threatens the bond of this small community. Obviously, the two events couldn't have come at a worse time...
In between beats of conversation, we are able to see personal exchanges between Corn and each member, during different time periods. These, coupled with the live messages in-chat, allows you to paint a clear picture of the man and his actions. There are hints from the start to what is going to happen, and what has happened (Spoiler - click to show)who knows how many times. The implications are pretty damning.
Honestly, I thought this game was completely linear at first. Before sending the first message, I tried clicking on the side arrows to see what it would do, but since nothing happened, I chalked it off as just "for show" (turns out, not every message has a choice, but the arrows always look the same). So I had, for better or for worse, the "middle ending" right off the bat. I've checked the other two endings, and I'm certainly glad I got this one first. Though none of the path feel "good", one feels realistic but disappointing (in the other members), the other quite uncomfortable (though it could probably lead to a "better" outcome for most).
Though I think most players would favour the more salacious choices, with how they are listed on the screen...
I think it would have driven the point further if we were able to go through previous conversations in the server. From the first live conversation, it is clear the users know each other well by now, and have created strong bonds with one another (and with Corn). But the only channel with potentially substantial discussion also starts with Sorry, older messages can't be loaded, per the settings in this server., which wouldn't make sense if you are a member of a server (why would all the messages be hidden every time someone logs off? especially for the purpose of discussions), but also thwart the possibility of understanding who the users are (what do they like? what kind of writing to they do? etc) and how they usually behave with one another (do they fight and make up? are they always friendly? how does Corn fits into their dynamics). Instead, you end up as an onlooker peering into what is happening right now and also controlling the members as puppets (I mean, you kind of are for the purpose of the story) - kinda weirdly voyeuristic?
On the interface side, I would have preferred if it had been a bit closer to the actual Discord interface, whether it is the palette use (I know you can change it on browser, but it would have been suuuuper unlikely everyone used the same green palette, especially considering how different the characters are) or the placement of elements on the screen. Though it was smart to keep the messages of the "playable" user separate from the rest of the chat, and each user getting their personal pfp.
Definitely a confronting game, thought not completely unrealistic. Interesting mechanic and interface wise, discomforting story wise.
The cabin of your dream..., April 2, 2024Cozy Simulation 2999 is the coziest Twine experience you will ever have. Set in a remote cabin in the mountain during winter, you get to enjoy peace and tranquillity, with all the comfort and activities you'd want to have. Maybe you could just spend your day staring at the fire, or drink all kinds of warming drinks, or you might be more into eating to your heart's content or creating meaningful art pieces... or how about taking a walk outside huh?
Sounds enticing doesn't it? Not having to worry about anything else but the coziness of yourself in an idyllic (and strangely isolating) settings. Being taken care of by a lovely narrator that not only listens to your wishes but expand your ability to do things as time pass. Isn't it JUST NICE and definitely not skin crawling when you stop and think about all the things that seem just a tad out of place, or details that just don't quite add up... and what about those memories that keep haunting your dreams?
But are you truly ready to open the door and find out?
Ok some spoily stuff I liked
(Spoiler - click to show)the contrast between the simulation and real life (he I clocked that at the start but it was just too cozy to matter), the pretty eerie descriptions of items hinting at something that happened, the eviscerating descriptions in the "real" world with the conveyor belt of bodies... Going from the cozy end to the less than cozy ones is exciting but creepy as heck!
It's a really cool game for a first Twine game attempt!
Tag, you're it!, April 2, 2024Faery: Swapped is a short parser games where the central puzzle revolves around swapping names of things/people in the correct order to reach the end. As the title suggests, you (a non-descript child) believe 100% that the new arrival in the family is not actually your sibling but a changeling (swapped by fairies), though no one seem to care about your convictions. Since no one wants to listen to you (because what else but a changeling cant this wrinkled thing be?), you set yourself to prove it to everyone! Problem is: the baby is kept out of your reach.
The mechanic is pretty unusual (and I would love to check out the code behind it!) and ends up making things quite confusing after a few swaps - you will need to keep track of what is what to get to the end. Or write single detail down and make a plan before getting into the game.
It took me a while to get the hang on the puzzle itself and the order of the swaps. I had to restart a few times because I kept losing track of what I had swapped xD
Luckily, if you get stuck, there are some handy hints (given bit by bit so you don't spoil yourself too fast) to help.
A very neat puzzle!
Pro-Tip: Do not play while eating, or just after having eaten..., April 1, 2024Preambule: this was a good game that borked my brain a bit and put my thoughts in disorder. There is sense somewhere in this review, I think.
1 4 the $ is a Twine story about despair, the want to belong and feel loved, and manipulation. With a gloomy setting, where you play as a probably mentally ill, unemployed recluse, the game explores dark and confronting subjects: consumption in all its form. Going through the ups and downs of life (but mainly the downs) at the bottom of the barrel, you follow the protagonist's "last" days as they stumble upon a new crypto get-rich-quick scheme all the while dealing with a run-down lodging taken over by (a probably) sentient mould.
I say "last days" because of where the different endings take you.
The depiction of consumption in 1 4 the $ is multifaceted and very intriguing. From the literal aspect of the player consuming to sustain (even if it means eating literal mould), the mould taking over the protagonist's body until it consumes it all, online communities taking advantages of its members for entertainment, crypto shills targetting exploiting the gullible and disadvantaged. Everything is linked in some kind of way, working against/with each other to form the story, helping us (the reader) understand how the protagonist got where they are and the choice they make.
And on a level, it does not seem "bad", as the protagonist yearns for community themself, to feel understood or maybe just recognised and love, to feel like they have some sort of purpose or goal beyond feeling sorry for themself. In one path, they seem content to lose themself just to be a part of a thing. Or because they just can't fight anymore. Which ever depiction of the protagonist you end up with is incredibly bleak.
I quite liked the atmospheric background, with the glowing light animation, whose colour will depict a different part of the house, or the formatting of the text replicating social media platforms like Reddit or Discord, as well as the uneasy screens when you "talk" to the mould/yourself. The simple design added quite a bit to the disturbing vibe of the game.
Just small accessibility thing: the blue links are often not contrasted enough against the background.
Tip-toeing between feel-good and anxious-mess, April 1, 2024If you've heard of D&D, get ready for its unfocused cousin: Dungeons & Distractions!
This game hits all the right spots: it's light-hearted with realistic characters and situations (even if everyone got mixed up with the witching hour), the writing is witty and simply delightful, you get thrown to the wolves without clear winning/losing actions, and it's just a fun time...
... unless you can't managed to keep the distractions down and find yourself failing your players by being a too unfocused DM. For you, an AD&D wolf-person proposed to set up a one-shot with a couple of friends, with the intention of making it a recurrent thing. But that will only happen if you manage to keep your player on track and end the session right on time. And your players are not the easiest ones to deal with, between your TTRPG-experienced girlfriend that tries to be "helpful", the easily bored witch with silver clunky bracelets (and you're a werewolf, remember?), the executive deficient player who can't make up her mind in how to act, ... Many wrenches are thrown in your path, and you will need to keep your head cool enough to get the session right back on track if you want to wrap up before the timer runs out.
I wasn't surprised that on my first run of the game I didn't fail terribly, but just enough not to get the good ending. I reached the bad guy lair, and introduced it before... timer ran out and the party broke apart. Pretty fitting for my I'd say xD
It was the perfect palate cleanser (for when I played it)!
The Film is a surreal Interactive Fiction piece following a group of friend dealing with the anniversary of the loss of Marko, the "glue" of their group. To commemorate his memory, they watch the hard-to-find Director's cut of the cult movie Narcissus. During the movie, each individual goes through a psychedelic experience and is forced to confront their truth and their relationship with the rest of the group.
The different endings can be reached depending on the choice each individual make. Some are bittersweet, some are bone-chilling. Although it does not seem like there is a lot you can do, the choices does branch out quite widely, especially by the time you reach the ending.
Considering the seeds chosen by the authors, this was not really where I thought the game would end up going, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The confrontation of each individual about their personal relationship with Marko and the others, especially. It was so raw and unnerving.
Found Journal is an atmospheric kinetic entry, where you get to go through a page (or more?) of a journal left behind by some lost soul. Using as a base a weirdcore/distorted track, the short entry deals with feelings of loss (of self? relationship? someone?) and ambiguity. Illustrations have also been included within the pages, to accentuate the feelings of loneliness and helplessness.
It made me feel very uneasy (in a good way) by the time I reached the final page, but still hopeful the writer might have found a happy ending (though I very much doubt it). It was a vibe!
Hit on your friend, hit on your married friend, hit everyone!, March 31, 2024Sonnet is a relatively short game made in Twine, where you play as Will, a man invited to a single's Valentine's Day party, organised by a long-time and long-single rich friend of yours. As one could assume, where party are at, drama soon follows. The entry uses two seeds: "Palate" for the colour scheme of the interface, and "Reverse a Poem", taking the romantic and languishing "Sonnet 128" to a more salacious and less than chivalrous setting. Rather than long romantic bouts to express your love, why not a one night stand with your eccentric friend or your hot - but also still very married - other eccentric and musical friend?
The game is pretty cheeky in its interpretation of the main seed and the poem, and made me giggle quite a bit in the hidden references (especially Henry's description). It was also fun trying on the different paths and conversations, and reaching the multiple available endings. The game is sectioned into four parts (each named after a poetry term), formatted as strechtext when clicking on the different options. At the end of each part, you have the choice to restart it or continue to the next part. However, only the final part actually has consequences to the ending.
I did run into some conversation issues (bothering the Aline when first meeting her to the point of repeating the same text, or punctuation errors) and often ended up restarting the current part instead of continuing to the next one (switching the order of the links or maybe having one on top of the other would make more sense).
It was still quite entertaining for its size.
All The Games I Would Have Made For Seedcomp If I Had The Time (Which I Did Not) (Oh Well There's Always Next Year) is a short game going all on the meta, about the SeedComp! format and game reception. It emulates participating at the last possible minute in the competition, and finding what people think of that entry.
The game is essentially those two screens: picking the seeds from the SeedComp! you want to mix together into a game, and the IFDB page for said-game with its information and a handful of reviews. If I counted correctly (which I probably have not), there seems to be 5? possible games to check out.
While you don't get to play the games (all of them sounding like a riot - I hope you end up making them, KADW), there is just enough information to imagine what those games could have looked, how their atmosphere would have been, how fun the gameplay would have felt (or not). It's kind of bizarre (but fun bizarre) to play the game in your head rather than for real.
Now I wonder how it would look like with all 90 seeds of this edition XD
Poet on trial, March 13, 2024Poetic Justice is a short poetic and logical game made in Dendry, where you play as a legendary unnamed (at the start) poet on trial for plagiarism. On the bench, sit your peers, other iconic poets, ready to judge you. Will you manage to refute their arguments or face justice?
Worried about fairness? You get to choose one of those judges are your poet representative (though it ends up barely mattering... but you get to learn a bit more about them with a Wikipedia snippet).
Because it is also a fair trial, you get to review the evidence against you, before refuting each of the poets' arguments (I'm not sure why you need to fight your own lawyer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It's pretty much a breeze. But your own arguments are not enough, you need to trick them to see the idiocy in their thinking.
Which leads us to the main interactive element of the game: a logic puzzle. Each poet writes their own version of one of your poem, and your must choose the right order and combination so they all end up criticising each other. I ended up writing down all the options to get it.
The puzzle was neat. I wished I had more to do in the first half of the game, especially when refuting the arguments of the different poets. Or maybe even lose the trial (I don't think there is a bad ending?).
Politics and Relationships, always an interesting mix, March 13, 2024A Collegial Conversation is a short Twine interactive piece, lasting the time of a conversation during a fancy party. Two couples of different social classes, but linked with their workplace, exchanging some... words. While the story is fairly linear, and you may not affect it, it is told in an interesting manner: each scene can be read from the point-of-view of each selectable character. By clicking on the different names, you can switch POV and read what the next character sees, hear, or feels. All scenes can be read from one POV at a time after reaching the end.
It's not just fun to read about an event from different POvs, to see how differently they view one same situation, but explore their motivations for doing a specific action or saying a specific thing, their wants and worries, their pride and insecurities - but it also puts a lot of things into context. You get to understand the relationships between the characters, the politics happening in the workplace, and the tribulations of each characters. Even with so few passages, each character get a lot more depths than you'd expect.
I think I ended up keeping the spiciest of characters for last (it was a treat, I really enjoyed that POV's commentary), that was delightful. I was kind of wishing after going through all possible POVs to be able to get more of Seira's, the commissioner.
A fun use of the seeds too!
Weirdcore galore, March 12, 2024Made in Decker, this point-and-click game follows Linus (you), a young adult still living with her parents in what seems to be a Scandinavian Arctic town. Linus has not had the easiest of time, being a shadow of her brother, unsupported by her family, and having gone through a breakup. In this cold afternoon, you explore Linus’s home, looking first for a bite to eat, rummaging around and reminiscing about life.
With its low-bit and dithered aesthetic, the game falls deep into weirdcore when you hear a strange noise. The pixelled background sound and flipped palette renders the already melancholic-to-depressing atmosphere to a legit skin-crawling creepy one. I don’t know whether Linus was having some sort of out-of-body episode or some otherworldly beings were at play. I don’t think an answer is needed to enjoy the game however.
The entry used all songs, and explicitly indicated where those bits can be found in the game on the game page and the credits. Each song has been used in different ways, from taking snippets of the respective music video, displaying lyrics on the screen, to using it as an inspiration for the setting and story. It is a nice blend.
Forward is a short personal interactive piece made in Twine, about life. Worries and hopes, anxiety and assurance, failures and successes... the good and the bad of realities. Set as a meditation exercise, the prose weaves bits of memories of the past together, with sources of tensions and triumphs mirroring each other, showing both states will coexist, moving from one to the other, moving one with the other.
Setting aside the specific samples of situations, this is still an emotional piece hitting on those universal feelings of not being enough, of being lost and hopeless, of struggling with what is around us. And yet it still gives us a glimmer of hope, forcing us to think about the good things around us, of the achievements accomplished, how we grew and moved further than the struggles.
It is a good exercise to do.
Weirdcore galore, January 14, 2024Made in Decker, this point-and-click game follows Linus (you), a young adult still living with her parents in what seems to be a Scandinavian Arctic town. Linus has not had the easiest of time, being a shadow of her brother, unsupported by her family, and having gone through a breakup. In this cold afternoon, you explore Linus’s home, looking first for a bite to eat, rummaging around and reminiscing about life.
With its low-bit and dithered aesthetic, the game falls deep into weirdcore when you hear a strange noise. The pixelled background sound and flipped palette renders the already melancholic-to-depressing atmosphere to a legit skin-crawling creepy one. I don’t know whether Linus was having some sort of out-of-body episode or some otherworldly beings were at play. I don’t think an answer is needed to enjoy the game however.
The entry used all songs, and explicitly indicated where those bits can be found in the game on the game page and the credits. Each song has been used in different ways, from taking snippets of the respective music video, displaying lyrics on the screen, to using it as an inspiration for the setting and story. It is a nice blend.
Moving to the core., January 11, 2024Holy moley, what a game! Grabbed me by the throat and would not let me go...
I was at a loss for words for a long time when I reached the end.
Based on After the Accident, a poem by Sophia de Augustine, the story flips between the present, where excruciating pain and confusion overwhelms you, and snippets of memories, walking down a bittersweet memory lane. Showing that love is complex and relationships are complicated.
The mirrors between the present and the past, and the different snippets themselves, each adding details to what has come to be, bring powerful imageries and strong reactions towards the story and the characters. The deeper you go in the story, the more heartbreaking it becomes. But there is little you can do to change things. You know how it ends anyway. It is inevitable. By the end, I felt like a wreck, feelings in shambles.
There was an interesting aspect in the incredible writing: the function of mundane objects to convey the state of things. (Spoiler - click to show)The car is a wreck like the PC's relationship. The offered gift feels soft, giving you a warm lovely embrace, but still smells of the fight for the PC. Bread-making is used as a (re-)bonding moment, but drips of milk outside of the bowl breaks the hope of a good reconciliation. A meaningful portrait at the start of the relationship especially points out the PC's physical flaws, like a hint of what is come in the following months.
It is incredible powerful, raw descriptions of reality, painful depictions of love and hurt.
A voyeur for a minute, January 11, 2024The entry does an interesting thing with the mechanic, limiting the playthrough to a 60 seconds - though it lets you "rewind" and try as many times as you wish. The games track which passage you visited, making it easier to find the ones you still have left.
I get why the discussions were timed, but they ended up being more frustrating to read through they they should have been because of the timer...
Though that restart may remove all that pressure from the large timer in the background ticking down the minute, it ended up stressing me out so much I found myself clicking aimlessly rather than focussing on the text itself. I had to restart the whole file (because of the tracking formatting) and "hide" the timer from the screen to actually take in the story. The "game" would still end after a minute, making it a bit more sudden, but I wasn't anxiously counting down the seconds...
The story itself is not so much narratively driven but a more exploration or snippets from a third-party perspective. You don't really do anything but look at what is around you, happening regardless of you. A bit of a voyeuristic take, wishing you'd be part of the world you are looking at, but still being incredibly distant from it.
It was an interesting experience.
Clever puzzles. Interesting implementation., January 10, 2024free bird. is a minimalist hyperlink puzzle game, where you play as a bird (cockatoo?) locked in a cage yearning for freedom.
Using the seed “Feathered Fury” by Amanda Walker as the setting (locked birds by poachers), and “Room; Closed Door,” from Charm Cochran to format the text (only adjective + noun combo), the game takes us right inside the mind of our feathered friend. It is very effective in portraying this non-human perspective on the environment. And even with the minimalist writing style, the choice of adjectives gives a lot of personality to the PC (or bird-player-character).
The game has also a pretty clever set of puzzles, making you interact with different elements around you. Sometimes requiring a specific order, sometimes asking you to pick up an object and move it somewhere else... Its sparse hints give you just enough to nudge you the correct way. I still struggled a bit, picking up objects and going around the rooms, hoping it would do something... Still, it was pretty fun interacting with all those objects, carrying them on my back, and trying to trick other NPCs in helping me out.
Having different formatting between the interactive objects and other "rooms" made things easier when trying to solve the puzzles.
A pretty neat short game.
Escape Room - Bird Edition, January 8, 2024A pretty sweet and simple premise: you are a bird stuck inside a case, one you really want to escape. How? That is for you to find out.
Around you are other caged birds - some of which want to follow you to freedom, other disillusioned by the possibility. Each bird getting a "prisoner" trope was pretty funny (the old one who's been here forever, the loud one that might bring attention from the guards, the one who could betray you...)!
Framed as some sort of escape room (you can't just open the cage and fly away), the game gives enough tension throughout the text to feel the danger creeping ever so closer, which could foil your plan for freedom. Still, you have more than enough time to play all the available actions without getting caught (it is possible to click all options!).
It did make me wish for more puzzles/manipulation actions within the choices, to maybe feel a bit more “escape room”-y. If you are methodical in the order of picking choice (top->down) - like me - it resolves things a bit too quickly/simply.
And there might be a little bug, where the text does not take into account you ate the food?
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