Reviews by manonamora

People Fall is a tiny interactive piece about the mysterious disappearance of someone. Set in a floating city, it isn't uncommon for people to miss a step and fall to their doom - though you have a hard time to believe she would be so careless. It's just accidents can so easily happen...

This entry does a good job at creating a mysterious atmosphere. It was an interesting snippet into a fantasy society.

Rooftop Tolls is a tiny interactive puzzle, in which you found yourself trapped on a rooftop, required to pay a toll to find yourself free again. In classic text adventure traditions, it is a grumbling troll blocking your path, requesting payment in form of an apple to let you pass. The issue is, the apple tree is completely bare. If only you had a little bit of sunshine and water...

Sometimes, a simple but well-rounded puzzle is all you need to be effective. And it's cute!

WRITTEN is a looping philosophical interactive piece where you are given 500 words to define yourself, your life, your beginning and your end. In a completely white plane, stretching indefinitely, you have 500 words to make a mark, or disappear without a trace. To fight your fate or accept it. To leave unfinished or find comfort in knowing yourself.

This was both comforting and gave me an existential crisis. I loved the meta aspect of flipping the 500-word restriction onto the player, honestly genius. And there are so many ways of interpreting the piece itself: are we just the pen running through a blank page, with space for only 500 words before a new one is given? Talking to some sort of Death Administrator with limited time/energy to give you before you're filed away? A meeting with the Fates to define how your life will be before you're sent down to actually live it?

And why so little words? Why is a life defined by only 500 words? How can you describe or quantify a whole person with so little?

Twenty four is an interactive poem about turning twenty-four, a sequel of some sort of The Day I Turned 22. Struggling to wake up, getting through the motions of the day, reminiscing on simpler days and realising how far you've come... minutes tick away and whoop the day is gone - you're now twenty four. Here's to the one year passed, here's to twenty-four future ones!
Twenty-four clicks for twenty-four years... AND EVERY STANZA RHYMES~!

There's something quite relatable about the day before your birthday being pretty mundane, with little fanfare. Going through the motions of the day, like a cog in a machine, without feeling much anticipation for what is to come. An almost indifference towards the celebration, changing little in your life compared to other milestones (like getting a job, being respected and needed, etc...). Not feeling much different than the days before.

Bathroom Run is a tiny Twine game centred around... well, toilet jokes. You enter a bathroom with the different options of relieving yourself, as well as the possibility of doing so either sitting or standing up. Depending on what you do (and how many times you do it), you may get a funny response.

But yes, it's all pee and poop humour.

Quick! Summon a Demon! is a dark humour game where you're trying to summon a demon to escape the cops after you. The problem is that you don't have time to read the grimoire properly, or gather all the ingredients, or actually do the ritual like you should. So winging it it is!

Maybe nothing happens, maybe something does... and maybe it goes horribly wrong! In any case, it's fun to figure out what combination to make to get all the different endings. And the combinations can be pretty silly!

There's Something Inside Me. is a short horror-y piece made in Twine, about feeling your body changing, and struggling with it. Something inside of you has altered the way your body behaves and reacts to you, making you feel as if you have little to no control over it. You don't know where it comes from, how it got inside you, what it's going to do next, how to counteract it... This lack of agency (or help to overcome it) in turn pushes you to do anything to get rid of it.

I'm sympathetic to the struggle, seeing your body change and not recognise it. As if the bones and muscles and flesh are not really yours anymore. Something alien you inhabit and sometimes are able to control - but it doesn't *feel like you*. And it won't feel like you until it's gone. But you can't take it out either. It's with you, probably forever.

fleisch LARP is a surreal body-horror puzzle made in Decker following the conversation between Dr Coagule, an oneirodermatologist (or, you know... a crazy scientist), and his *literally* bystander-victim-critique, as the doctor attempt to create a flesh that dreams. By moving around the flesh pieces on the board, you unlock new bits of conversations, and learn more about this experimentation.

This is really a wild ride, whichever perspective you take. It's an intriguing puzzle from the science side, creating a whole new creature and giving it sentience because SCIENCE!, from bits and pieces of living flesh (my sink crawls just writing this), not shying away from the grossness of it all but also not seeing it as bad, very much in the Cronenberg alley. He's completely unhinged!

Then you have the BVC point of view, whose role is right there in its name, and is, I'm pretty sure, Piece n2 on the board. A bystander grossed out by the doctor's actions but not leaving. A critique of the doctor's methods but not stopping him either. And a victim, forced to watch, respond, and feel because SCIENCE!

I think it's pretty smart to use this pink palette for the game, like some forced of "rose-coloured glasses" to gloss over or diminish the obvious barehanded cruelty of the doctor's actions. The cutesie colours clashing with the gross reality of things.

My stomach was doing cartwheels but I kinda want to see what Dr Coagule would attempt next....

Home is an atmospheric introspective piece, where, in the course of 12 minutes (or more, if you want), you get to roam the different rooms of a house (the one you grew up in), and reflect as you look around, graze the objects within. There is no real story, just a place. And a space for you to write your thoughts, a minute at a time.

I... don't think I am the target audience for this entry. I was confused for a long time when I started it - granted, I try to get into each entry with as little information as possible, only reading descriptions after playing a bit (or the whole) - and frustrated. The piece gives 2-3 actions in each room, but no response/consequence/acknowledgement to what you did in the previous room (only lists 12 minutes later which action you did and if you wrote notes). As well, each room is described with just a couple of words, but you are stuck there for a minute, regardless of what you're doing.

I just felt like a ghost, swept from one room to the next, trying to interact with the environment but nothing reacting to me.

On the other hand: the interface and sound design is very soothing - if you needed a space for reflection, I think it does manage to create it. And there is something interesting about giving almost full control to the player. Letting you write whatever you want, one minute at a time.

The Floor is Lava is a tiny adventure, where a child is thrown into a game of "the floor is lava" as soon as their mother leave the room. Exciting times ahead... were it not for Bunny, their plushy on the other side of the room, in quite the predicament. Can you manage to reach it before it's too late?

This was one of the cutest entries I've read. It's a very light-hearted premise (or dramatic if you don't manage to save Bunny), and pretty creative (small children's imaginations really are something). The animated buttons (looking like lava bubbles moving) were a nice touch.

A fun entry to the jam, gave me a few chuckles!