Beneath the Weeping Willow

Guests arriving in the airbnb! A chance for you to be noticed, perhaps to be free of whatever it is that still chains you to the mortal world…

Through simple poltergeist tactics, you can interact weakly with items and furniture. If you time your meddlings to the movements of the guests, you can guide them to discover your fate.

Moving through the house and finding out which things you can move or disturb not only alerts the guests to your presence, it also allows you (both the semi-amnesiac protagonist and the player) to reconstruct your past and identity. A very sad tale unfolds…

Good writing, moving story, interesting characters. I liked it.

This was a compact but complex puzzle game, impressive for being written in 4 hours.

You are a ghost, only able to interact with the world once each year. The house you are in is being used for a vacation by guests. Your goal is to interact with them to guide them to the truth.

Unfortunately, you are very weak, and time is short. I found myself struggling (in character) to do almost anything, like opening windows and doors. But after replaying several times and exploring, I discovered the pattern needed to win.

Dialog and presentation were good and the puzzles were engaging and not too hard or too easy. Great work.

Beneath the Weeping Willow is a short, sweet ghost story in which you play the ghost. It's written in Ink, using a tasteful and well designed custom interface. It's the "open map" type of choice-based game, in which the player is free to move back and forth between rooms much as they can in a parser game.

The player character is a ghost who has a limited time to alert the new owners of her house to her presence and guide them towards discovering her fate. Being incorporeal, this is not as easy as it sounds. I must have the right instincts, though, because I solved the game on my first go!

I enjoyed this game despite it only taking me a few minutes to complete. It's well written, though I feel the descriptions could be more atmospheric. I noticed one typo (a repeated word, in the letter). The presentation is excellent, including one innovation I hadn't seen before: the page refreshes each time you make a choice, but there's also a history option which shows you the whole text of the game so far.