The Whale's Keeper

This game was really charming! You find yourself waking with amnesia in the belly of a whale. I ended in half an hour with 17 sanity and 21 passages seen altogether– though since there are clearly 90 passages to be seen in total, I definitely missed a bunch.

Having gotten an extremely good ending (Spoiler - click to show)of becoming the whale’s keeper with Jonah and getting the vague impression that several other endings were not-as-pleasant, I don’t feel a strong desire to replay (not due to it being uninteresting or unengaging, but rather because I am a weenie with horror and such).

The prose is written evocatively and I felt drawn into the depths of the mystery just like the protagonist. With that and the beautiful inked pictures in the beginning (though I think they lessened over time?) I felt the majesty of the whale almost as much as the protagonist did – it almost made me wish that I could experience such a thing as a whale’s call from inside the whale! However the amnesia bit is a little overplayed in my opinion.

Jonah was a cheerful character and I couldn’t imagine hurting him when he was so kind and excitable. I felt tension with some choices in hoping I wouldn’t upset him or make a misstep since we didn’t speak the same language. Who he was, how he got there, etc were intriguing questions, but the game’s ending soothed me with the idea that it didn’t matter.

The Plotopolis system is slick, designed to be played on the Telegraph phone app but working on the web just as well. I spotted no typos or bugs whatsoever.

As someone who loves the ocean, I felt very soothed by the game. At least with my ending, it felt like a dream where you wake up feeling refreshed rather than exhausted. Good job!