Thirst for blood

In Thirst For Blood, you’re a mosquito looking to drink some egg-nourishing blood. The premise presents interesting challenges for the author: how to describe and navigate the vertical aspects of a mosquito’s world, how to present the PoV, what challenges to give the player.

The mechanics of the game were pretty simple: navigate, examine. The implementation is variable— smell indicates the direction of CO2 concentration, a description of a poster changes after examination, but a necklace is mentioned that doesn’t seem to exist, and the taste of the skin is referenced but “taste skin” gets you a default response. You can’t actively bite; it’s just something that happens after you enter a specific room; I wanted to be actively bite the human! I liked the vertical aspect of the environment, and I liked that it didn’t always clearly map. (You have to go up, s, and then down to get to the neck, and can’t get there by just going S from the mid-height room.) It felt like the way a flying insect might map out safe flight paths. The directions weren’t consistently signaled, sometimes included in the room description and sometimes not mentioned at all, but overall it was fairly hard to get lost.

The ostensible goal here is to get blood, but there’s a sort of hidden goal that carries most of the game’s content. A points system encourages the player to explore entirely bloodless items, and while I like the concept of revealing what’s really happening through examining objects, but I’m not sold on how to game handles mosquito PoV. We aren’t really inhabiting a naturalistic version of a mosquito’s sensory or cognitive world, but we don’t get much characterization of the mosquito as an insectoid person, either. For example, gas concentration and heat are part of descriptions, but descriptions are still primarily visual. Mosquitos aren’t blind, but their visuals are attuned to IR/heat sources and are affected by smell; when you mistake a poster for a hole in the wall, through which you can see distant nude humans, it’s an unlikely mistake for a real squeeter to make. At one point you can read and interpret bloodwork results. Mosquitos being born as expert phlebotomists is funny, but later when you try to pick up a jewel you’re told it’s too heavy and "that’s not something an insect usually does.” Mosquitos don’t usually see a dolphin plush and reminisce about their own aquatic larval days, don’t recognize diamond cutters and lament that no one will listen to their true crime theories because they’re just a bug, either, though. And while you recognize these things, and have some thoughts about them, there’s no characterization. Forget the how of it all, why does this mosquito care? Does she have opinions about it?

IMO, the game would’ve worked for me a little more if it had either committed to the classic “critter that recognizes and has thoughts about human stuff” bit OR leaned into the dramatic irony of a mosquito who doesn’t understand much of what she encounters but which we, the players, are able to recognize.

Overall, the concept is fun, it’s a mosquito-bite-sized little experience, and I always love to see an invertebrate protagonist. This is the sort of project that while not entirely successful in its current form, could really shine with a little more attention. I'd love to see a post-comp update.