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Lovecraftiana with a twist or two, December 3, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The blurb for Beneath Fenwick says its genre is “suspense, with horror overtones”, but the opening of this parser-aping Twine game couldn’t be hitting the Lovecraft notes harder if it tried. The protagonist is on a creepy old bus, being driven towards an isolated New England town, and once you arrive the dilapidated architecture, pug-ugly inhabitants, and even the creepy grocery store invoke Shadow Over Innsmouth so directly that it’s clearly intentional. The story doesn’t stick too closely to that template, though – we’re in the present day, not the 1920s, and rather than being alone, the botany-student protagonist (named… Hedgerow) arrives alongside her boyfriend, as they’re both planning on attending the local college. Vive la difference, but still, I wound up wishing it had stuck with the horror tropes more fully, as the story slowed down in its last half before ending too abruptly. And while I usually enjoy the puzzley gameplay this kind of Twine game enables, Beneath Fenwick could have benefitted from leaning into its choice-based nature a little more fully.
Starting with the second piece first, the game’s interface does a really good job of mimicking parser conventions. Notable bits of scenery, usable objects, and other characters are highlighted in the text, and clicking on any of them pops up a new window with a more detailed description and possibly further possibilities for interaction – taking, unlocking, all the usual medium-dry-goods stuff, plus talking, which gives you a choice of topics. There’s a full inventory a click away, which works similarly, as well as a subsystem that lets you combine two or more carried objects. The major departure is in navigation: instead of compass directions, exits are listed by name.
This works well, but what you get is what you get, and I wound up missing more traditional Twine touches. Beyond the plain-vanilla puzzles, there are long cutscenes – especially the opening sequence – where there’s just a single continue option available, and the keyword-based conversation system doesn’t allow for dialogue choices. I suppose that it’s odd that I’m totally willing to roll with these limitations in a parser game, but it still seems a shame to do so much work to re-create in Twine the things that parser systems aren’t as good at.
The other issue I ran into had to do with moving around the world. The map is very dense, with a number of different roads and locations in the town, and the boarding house where the main characters wind up staying has an especially large number of rooms whose interconnections aren’t obvious and which have forgettable names. I know many folks find compass directions inaccessible, but they would have made it much easier for me to build a mental model of how the geography fit together.
Story-wise, Beneath Fenwick does a good job with the gradual build of tension. It’s beyond clear from the get-go that something’s deeply wrong in this town, but the game doesn’t tip its hand too early by indicating which of the many, many creepy people, places, and things on hand are the main threats. There’s at least one clever bait-and-switch (Spoiler - click to show)(the university at the edge of town isn’t a Miskatonic-style hotbed of occultism – in fact you never make it there), and it steers clear of the typical Lovecraft-game shift into gonzo violence midway through. At the same time, that means that some of the mid- and late-game felt slow, and even unmotivated – the requirement to fully explore the boarding house on the second day before running your errands felt artificial, and to get to the endgame sequence you need to break into a shed with no indication there’s anything important there.
Speaking of the ending, it’s effectively surprising, but rather abrupt – there’s no denouement to speak of, and the resolution of the mysteries of Fenwick felt disappointingly straightforward. I almost felt like the game stopped midway through – I would have definitely stuck around for a second hour that added in some more interesting puzzles and deeper interactions, while ramping up the tension into a more sustained climax. It’s always good to leave the player wanting more, of course, but maybe not so much more.
Highlight: The main character’s boyfriend – Randall, an architecture major – is a delightful fuddy-duddy despite being in his early 20s. He even introduces the protagonist (his girlfriend, again) as “my companion”!
Lowlight: It is possible to die in Beneath Fenwick, and while it offers a one-turn rewind, I think this can leave you stuck in an unwinnable state. Fortunately I’d done a save at the beginning of the day when this happened, but it was still frustrating to have to replay a bunch of the quotidian exploration I’d already completed.
How I failed the author: Playing the game went fine, but Henry’s been super congested and fussy today so I’ve written this review in like ten two-minute bursts, so apologies if it’s choppy and doesn’t make sense!