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Beware of the melody..., November 22, 2023All Hands is a short horror-y interactive piece set on a ship, one you can explore, and maybe find its secrets. Its prose is atmospheric horror, with a hint of lovecraftian. In each screen, the game offers up to three actions (Regard/Approach/Take) to interact with the text or the environment. There are multiple endings, but found just one.
Due to the vagueness of the prose on what is truly happening or even your own backstory, the entry leaves quite a bit to the player's interpretation. Called to the sea, but always forbidden to sail, you find your way to the Devil's Delight, a singular type of ship. Aboard, almost pulled in by a strange tune (music? voice?), you can explore the different rooms of the ship, or interact with the Captain's. At the end, I found myself back on the shore, believing Albertina was some sort of a mermaid, and I was her prey; and the ship itself felt a bit ghost-like.
I quite enjoyed the interactivity of this texture game, with the different actions (almost parser-like kind), how you could explore the ship and interact with different element (the books made me giggle). The few available actions give the illusion of restricted agency for the character, as if the PC was restricted in their movement or abilities on this strange ship. That and the imageries from the text really gives a creepy and almost suffocating vibe to the game.
But I wonder if Texture was the best engine to use for that, due to the lengthy hidden content shifting the text formatting (I liked the content a lot! Texture formatting it less so).