Ratings and Reviews by Mr. Patient

WARNING: This review includes some discussion of sexual assault.

Sometimes you'll see a piece of media and think, This is the writer's barely-disguised fetish. This is not one of those pieces of media. There is no disguise. One (More) Week in Dolcett is an AIF game with a focus on a singular kink: getting off on being cooked and eaten (while probably also appealing to those who prefer to do the cooking and eating). Given the relative puniness of the IF community, I suspect that this hits the sweet spot for exactly one person in this comp: the author.

I'm not going to dwell much on the subject matter. Know that it features phrases like "(Spoiler - click to show)cunt steak" spoken in earnest, and that there's graphic material on nearly every page. And also know that it features several instances of sexual assault. (The assailant is deadly serious, while the subject is getting off on it). Heed the content warnings.

In this universe, there's a country to which women travel with the intent of being cooked and eaten for their own and others' sexual gratification. You go there to rescue an infuriating naïf who doesn't realize what she's gotten herself into. But also maybe to go get eaten yourself. And possibly to start a revolution so that women only get eaten when they consent to it, which is definitely not the case in Dolcett. Partway through the game, I thought, ah, this might just be an over-the-top allegory for women's rights and sexuality in general, but that thought was quickly overwhelmed by the relentless spotlight on the details of the kink.

Let's focus on the gameplay. For most of it, you get about a thousand words of story, followed by a binary choice. One of these choices is right, and leads to another thousand words of story (often well beyond what you thought you were choosing to do), while the other generally leads to death, which also leads to another thousand words (it is the fulfillment of the kink, after all). At the start of the game, you are told that you can usually determine the correct path with a close reading of the text. And perhaps this is true, at least for some portions of the game. But I must confess that I did not read closely after a while, not just because I was still doing no better than chance at selecting the right path, and not just because the material was challenging to get through, but because there is just so much text. It was hard to stay motivated.

The game has a special mechanic that pops up from time to time: a Porpentine-like wall of dozens of links, with only one leading to success. Your search is timed, and failure to select the right link within the allotted span leads once again to demise on someone's plate, breathlessly described.

There's a bit of a break at what I thought was the endgame, but turned out to be more like the 60% mark. You get a choice of three mutually exclusive paths to reach a certain destination. I chose the one labeled the shortest. I can't speak to the other paths, but here is where the gameplay became really problematic. Suddenly the game is a little more typically Twine-like, with eight to ten links peppered throughout a couple of screens of text. As before, most of these lead to death and a reset back to square one of the scene. And most of them look rather similar. So gameplay turned into excruciating lawnmowering as I figured out which of the 8-10 links was the correct one, then moved on to the next page with the next set of links. This went on for half a dozen pages. I persevered in the belief that I was close to the end, but as noted, I really wasn't. I trudged on to get to the True Ending, which, after telling me that I had won, gave me another 1500 words to digest.

Needless to say, I can't recommend this game for most people. But if this somehow happens to match your freak, you're in for a heaping helping of material.

You've already played this game many times. You go down into the dungeon as a weakling with minimal equipment. You kill monsters in randomized turn-based combat and upgrade your gear and stats as you go. You keep doing this until you get to the bottom and defeat the final boss.

This particular version of the trope has a few quirks. In order to TAKE anything (not GET, which is not recognized), your bag must be open and have room. You have to close the bag before you can move. You have to manually equip stuff in each hand. It's tedious, but you get used to it after a while.

Weirdly, the game didn't display properly for me even though it's a Windows executable and I'm running Windows:

←[38;2;240;154;82mDUNGEON SURFACE←[0m
←[38;2;232;189;88m←[38;2;232;189;88mTHE JAWS OF THE ←[38;2;237;142;173mDUNGEON←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m CLENCH BENEATH YOU.
WOLF-LIKE WINDS SLICE YOUR SENSES.
A TEMPEST OF GOD'S TEARS WHIP VIOLENTLY,
DRENCHING YOU AS THUNDER RUMBLES IN THE DISTANCE.←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m←[0m←[0m

There's one more noteworthy feature, which I'll hide for anyone intending to take this game as a serious challenge: (Spoiler - click to show)when you save the game it helpfully lets you know that the state is being kept in a JSON file. I was reminded of Simon Christiansen's Trapped in Time, which deliberately tempted players to cheat. I played MAD WARRIOR straight for about an hour and seven levels' worth of rooms before granting myself some major quality-of-life improvements and speeding things to a conclusion. Without that, I think it would have taken five or six hours to complete.