Sweetpea

by Sophia de Augustine profile

Horror
2022

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Number of Ratings: 13
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1-13 of 13


- Tabitha / alyshkalia, October 29, 2023

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
When trying is not enough..., August 11, 2023
by manonamora
Related reviews: springthing

A chilling and confusing snippet of life told through the eyes of a small child dealing with struggling parental figures, in a gothic style

Horror is usually not my style because I am a bit of a chicken, but Sweetpea's big eyes and scared demeanor pulled me in and would not let go until this game was complete. [This is actually my second playthrough]

The vivid descriptions of the surroundings or Sweetpea's feelings, as well as the formatting and animations of the text added onto my discomfort and uneasiness. Yet, I could not look away. I had to check all the boxes and find all the hidden links to understand the troubles the eponymous character was going through.

I actually didn't catch this the first time around, but it is (Spoiler - click to show)heavily implied the father is an alcoholic following the mother's departure (death?), behaving strangely in her eyes when drunk. The hints were all there, from the stranger who looks like dad but is not like dad; the broken glass and the sickness in the bathroom, or the father leaving for hours/days on end. It is clear the father is trying his best (and failing at the task), but his guilt is not enough to change him (until the end is reached). The horror of every day life...

Even the second time around, I was still quite confused at the second "act" with Micheal, not because of the change of background marking a new beginning in the story, but by the shift in the story going from a grim reality told through the eyes of a child, to being swooped by some sort of guardian angel in some imaginary place and being served breakfast. (Spoiler - click to show)Then afterwards, the context of alcoholism with the father kind of makes it as if the dad was sobered up then, caring for his child.

While the story ends on the positive note, it still depict a grim part of life, where hurt people hurt other people (and worse, children), which shook me to my core. The contrast of the pain and the panic of the child with the fond remembrance of gifts or the soothing taste of a sweet makes it all the harder to go through. This is accentuated by the gothic style of writing, making this everyday horror more vivid and visceral.

Chills going down the spine at every turn.

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- Jaded Pangolin, February 10, 2023

- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), January 8, 2023

- OverThinking, November 4, 2022

- ArloElm, October 20, 2022

- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 6, 2022

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Bad dad, June 14, 2022
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2022

I’ve always thought that it must be really tricky to write in the gothic mode. Play it too straight, and you get a standard horror story where everybody’s wearing a costume for some reason. Steer too much the other way, and you get Gary Oldman vamping “I never drink… vine” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (let me be clear: this movie is completely dumb and I love it to pieces). Success means keeping the balance between the extremes, but a plodding, boring stability won’t work: to truly be gothic, a work needs to go all out, constantly teetering at the edge of going too far.

Sweetpea takes on this challenge, though, and makes it look easy – its lush, hothouse prose is deliciously creepy and deliciously engaging, keeping me at the edge of my seat from the story’s grabby beginning through its many twists and turns. The plot is fun, and interactivity is cannily deployed to heighten player engagement through what eventually reveals itself to be a linear story. But it’s the writing that’s the real star of the show. Consider that opening, as the teenaged protagonist looks down at the figure – possibly her father, possibly an uncanny doppelganger – suing for entrance into her home in the middle of the night:

"You aren’t too high off of the ground, and with the full moon smiling above clouds scudding lowly over the rolling hills, there should be enough light to catch off of his hair, to illuminate his face."

Then upon considering opening the window to call out:

"Should you? The glass squeaks beneath your touch, dribbles of icy condensation slicking the inside of your wrist as the pane warms with your body heat. If you yell loudly enough, he should be able to hear you."

This just works – there are lots of adjectives and lots of clauses, stretching the sentences to a languorous span, and each is chosen with a careful eye to its sensual appeal. The plot tropes also hit the right notes: the protagonist is a sheltered adolescent, used to being left alone in a genre-appropriate big house by her often-absent, eccentric father (who, we’re told “doesn’t talk to you about his experiments”, and by the way, happens to do a lot of laundry).

There’s a lot that’s only alluded to, or conveyed only by implication – the creepiest bit of the game is how casually the narrator begins mentioning her friend Michael (Spoiler - click to show)(while apparently friendly, he’s an archangel portrayed with some fidelity to medieval traditions, with multiple shifting eyes and rainbow coloring, which is eerie as all get-out). There are some flat-out scary set-pieces too, like the two encounters with the maybe-father, which I won’t spoil in detail.

The player has a good number of choices throughout, whether through inline links that allow you to dig deeper into the protagonist’s perceptions or memories, or end-of-passage boxed options that allow you to pick dialogue, or decide which parts of the house to visit. You don’t have total freedom, and some of the protagonist’s choices felt off-kilter to me – she seems to rush into thinking there’s something wrong with her maybe-father very quickly, but at the same time thinks nothing of taking a nap with his identity still unresolved – but this helps underline that she’s probably not traditionally sane.

There was one place, though, where it seemed like game’s logic got a little tripped up – my second visit to the father’s study had a description that didn’t seem to acknowledge I’d already been there and knew it was empty. I also wound up thinking the story could have been either slightly tightened or slightly extended; after a long sequence wrapping up the initial situation, there’s a short, hallucinatory interlude before a quick finale. The interlude felt like it ended just as I was starting to settle into, though, so I think the pacing would have worked better if it had either had room to establish a new status quo, or had been bottom-lined in order to get to the final conflict more quickly.

Hopefully it’s clear these are very minor critiques of a self-assured, effective debut game. Sweetpea sets and sustains a goosebumping, creepy-crawly mood, and leaves enough mysteries enticingly unplumbed – how does the protagonist know Michael? What’s the deal with the paintings? What happened to her mother? – to keep it running through my head even a couple of days after I played it. It’s a tense, well-written pleasure.

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- Ann Hugo (Canada), May 19, 2022

- EJ, May 12, 2022

- Rovarsson (Belgium), April 27, 2022

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Angelic intervention with a creepy father-like being, April 15, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This was a game of big contrasts for me. There were parts of it that were phenomenal and parts I struggled with.

This is a story about a young girl alone at home whose father is outside, texting her to let him in. The problem is, though, that her father was in the study just a little while ago.

I loved the writing in this. Vivid and surreal images mixed together for a very creepy feel. It reminded me of some goosebumps stories when I was younger, like the one where the dad was a plant scientist.

I had a couple of problems with the choice structure, though. Where I struggled the most was:
-It was hard to differentiate between 'side-topic choices' and 'move on' choices. There are two distinct kinds of choices in the story: pink boxes and in-line links. But sometimes an inline link was a 'moving on' choice and sometimes a 'side-topic', and you couldn't tell just from placement. The pink boxes looked a bit out of place, too.
-I felt out of sync with the options. Something scary would happen, and I'd think 'I have to get out!' but the options were always things like 'Hang out and explore' or 'eat some food'. For some reason I couldn't get my mind in sync with the character.

I love horror and find this writing style to be very enjoyable, so I'd definitely like to see more games from this author. I just hope that I'll be more in synch with the choice structure next time.

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A disturbing game to be alone at home., April 15, 2022

SWEET PEA

This game is middle lenght. I have played it reading carefully the text. The idea and the game itself are very inmersive.
Think about “home alone” and some bad clown while you are sleeping in the bed: frightening.
My only complaint is that I have got to a ciclyc dead end. I don’t know the real end. I will play it again later in the night.

Jade.

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