little

A tiny yarn about a creepy girl, needles, bodies, and an even creepier narrator. Chandler Groover is excellent at creating grotesque fairytales and disconcerting narrative voices, and this piece is no exception. Its barebones narration and interface works well to create the atmosphere, allowing the player to fill in the gaps – inevitably with more horrible images than could be depicted. One section reminded me of the party garden sequence from howling dogs, though rather than decadence overload, it gives the piece an added inexorable chill.

This game is confusing; I played it through 3 times. But it's polished, with descriptive writing, had a haunting emotion, and I've already replayed it a few times. So I'm giving 4 stars.

Most of Groover's purposely opaque work is an allusion to some known fairy tale, which provides a framework for understanding the piece. His original stories tend to provide more in the way of explanations.

This piece is a hidden-object fetch quest, with a sort of standing-up-to-bullies theme that reminded me of Andrew Schultz's frequent theme of 'everyone told you you were worthless and now you'll show them'.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle of trying to piece it all together. It never gelled for me, but that's okay; having some things left unresolved improves the atmosphere.