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Number of Ratings: 13
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1-13 of 13 - Tabitha / alyshkalia, December 13, 2023
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Help me help you., December 12, 2023~~ Updated Review from the 2022 IFComp bc I replayed it recently ~~
Thanatophobia is a relatively short horror chat-like parser in which you play a therapist trying to uncover what is scaring Madeline, your patient. There are two elements to uncover, before you can make progress and reach the end.
I remember enjoying this game quite a bit when I first played this game, mainly because this is a parser where you could type complete nonsense and still get a coherent response out of the chatbot. Even if there are hints on the page, to guide your psychological session, their vagueness didn't make you feel cheated for solving the puzzle. My stance on the game has somewhat evolved since.
As with my first playthrough the game, I enjoyed the psychological horror aspect of the story. From the start, there is something quite wrong with the person answering your questions - questions often left somewhat unanswered. Madeline only reveals the truth when your force it out of her, probing her mind until she gives in - which at times requires quite a bit of walking around the bush, as she is not the most forthcoming person, deflecting any element that is a bit too hard to deal with.
Replaying it so long after, I had honestly forgotten about the twist that came with the final beat of the game. Until the absolute last moment, I even was doubting who the strange figure was truly (something I had caught early on the first time around). Still, that moment brings everything into context, showing how much Madeline struggles with her issues and how it affected her. It is incredibly sad, yet ends on a hopeful note.
The horror aspect of this game doesn't just stem from the setting itself, and the story as a whole, but the gameplay as well. Unlike the majority of parsers, this one is not bound by rigid commands to advance the plot. Instead, the system will still respond to the most strange commands given (even complete and utter nonsense). It is incredibly eerie how the "AI" answer your questions, even striking back in frustration when you are not making any substantial progress with the session.
But this system is not without friction. As it is a chat-experience, Madeline does not say more than a few sentences at a time, forcing you to time a command during monologues - which at times broke if the command resembled a bit too much one for another bit of the story. I think I would have rather gotten a larger block of text, or multiple messages in a row.
In the same vein, getting information out of Madeline is sometimes pretty frustrating, even if you can mark it out as 'the patient being a bit difficult in sessions because it is a heavy topic'.
Overall, this was an interesting game. One I do not wish to revisit any time soon.
Turns out, I have thanatophobia too :/
- Zape, December 10, 2023
- lyda01, July 27, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, February 5, 2023
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Chatbots: Innovative Same-iness, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Because of specific compatibility needs, this game made me install Opera. Better be worth it! It’s fine actually, the linux build was seamless enough.
I think this is my first interaction with a Chatbot since I tripped over ELIZA (already deeply out of date) on the early internet. “Pshh, c’mon reviewer, Siri and Alexa are everywhere…” NO. NO NO NO. Spybot Siri and Agent Alexa are not welcome in my life! “Dad, they only listen when you talk to them…” said my adorably naive daughter. It took a way too long silent stare to get her to tumble onto how they know you are addressing them… Does this make me sound like the Unibomber? To repurpose a Chris Rock OJ Simpson joke, “I’m not saying he shoulda done it. I’m saying I understand.” Hm, not sure that was as funny as I wanted it to be. Not sure the original joke was either. Oh God, I’M WEARING A HOODIE RIGHT NOW!!! Maybe its best if you politely let me cut away to…
Thanatophobia! A chatbot that is totally not spying on me! Well, the server is logging my every input… I’m backing away from the brink. I promise.
My first impression was both how much and how little progress has been made since ELIZA. As I recall, Eliza’s ‘trick’ was to keep asking questions using text you had just typed to give the illusion of talking. Was that Eliza? I think so. Or maybe I’m confusing 'her' with a psychoanalysis bot. I’m just gonna go with Dr. Eliza for the rest of this. Thanatophobia kind of reversed the equation. It was at its most convincing when I asked questions and it answered. It had a convincing array of answers ready for me too! About family, friends, jobs, relationships. There were great stretches of reasonable dialogue, though inevitably most of them terminated into “don’t wanna” before I was done. The "don’t wanna"s were pretty ok, felt natural as much as unnatural which is a step above most IF. The illusion was enough that I slipped into Engagement pretty quickly.
It was a weird experience though. I would go through stretches of hyper-effective conversation to hit stretches of close-but-not-quite. The uncanny valley of dialogue. The overall effect was Engaging, but with intellectual reserve. It did give me a moment of amusement, albeit perhaps at the game’s expense, when I had cause to say “I got that” after a particularly egregious bout of repetition.
The uncanny valley was most pronounced when what felt like a pretty natural, meandering conversation suddenly took on NPC-driven endgame urgency of “who is it? who is it, huh? tell me, who is it?” I fought this for two reasons. On the one hand, in my role as therapist, I didn’t feel like we were ready for specificity. On the other, there were some questions I still wanted answers to that seemed as or more important than the mysterious identity. Eventually, I was bullied to spamming candidates until there was an answer they liked, and only as a declarative, not a suggestion to digest together. It seems like there is a narrative fix for this, if I can be forgiven the presumption. (Spoiler - click to show)If the threatening figure, so far aloof, had advanced on the NPC in a perceived threatening way that would have given some rationale to the sudden urgency of the question, and gotten me on board with providing an immediate answer.
The rushed ending, and in particular my spamming response to it, nevertheless credited me with a “win.” It made me wonder if there was a “loss” scenario. That’s fine, sometimes IF is really only about the story. Here though, a key part of the Engagement was the illusion that I could help, and driven by the prospect that I MIGHT NOT. A bit of edge is taken off when it feels like (warranted or not) maybe failing was never a possibility. Or maybe, that impression was just an artifact of Chatbot limitations, I can’t tell. Let’s credit it to that, and club it with the uncanny valley to call it Notable. I do really like how different this was than most IF I've played this year.
Anyway, I’ve got Opera now. But who am I kidding. I use Firefox/DuckDuckGo with a massive superstructure of privacy plugins. That’s not gonna change.
Played: 11/2/22
Playtime: 30min, success
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Notable chatbot limitations
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- EJ, November 21, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- jaclynhyde, October 22, 2022
- reyryan, October 21, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Please help her, October 9, 2022I enjoyed this one a lot. It was atmospheric and slightly creepy. The gameplay centers around your character asking questions to a girl who is begging for help. You have to guess the right things to ask, and the NPC responds. The author has developed an impressive system in which a lot of what I tried got fairly relevant responses. I was genuinely motivated to figure out how to help the girl. There are no content warnings, as that would spoil important details, but be aware you may read descriptions or see images that could disturb some players. I was able to finish fairly quickly, but I am interested to see what other responses are available, so I would replay Thanatophobia again.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A chatbot game where you help a woman deal with a troubling figure, October 8, 2022This game has a fairly unusual format. Like parser games, you type in text and get a text response. Unlike parser games, it's not necessarily deterministic; instead, with a chatbot structure, it reacts to keywords. I tried to see if it was using GPT-3 or something similar, but it was hard to tell; it knew a bit about Harry Potter but not so much about Chemistry. Overall, it felt somewhat more like a hand-rolled chatbot and less like a standard AI bot.
There are several things to discover in this game, but it can be hard to know what to do first. Just messing around will eventually lead the game to guide you towards a solution. I was able to finish without hints, and it took me about an hour.
For content warnings, the game does contain a fairly gruesome realistic image later on (a (Spoiler - click to show)blue-lipped overdose victim).
Overall, the chatbot system was a bit hard to use but I felt like it guided me to where I wanted to go. The text has a fairly descript 'voice' and nice little details, although necessarily due to the technology it didn't respond directly to my questions, leading to some bland messages.
I like 'dream games' and surreal stuff. Overall, I think this worked fairly well, but I don't really see a ton of replay value and I think the chatbot structure could be refined over time (although I imagine that it's a real challenge to work on something like this).
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