Beneath the Weeping Willow

The least important thing about this game is that every time I see the title I start humming the similarly-titled folk song, and I don't want to be the only one doing that so I'm sharing it with you. You're welcome.

Moving along, Beneath the Weeping Willow is an Ink game where you play as a ghost. A couple of vacationers have rented out your old house on AirB&B on Halloween night, the only night you can interact with the living, so this is your one shot to try to get them to solve the mystery of your death and lay you to rest properly. Despite the ghost situation, the spookiness factor is low, and the general atmosphere is one of autumnal coziness tempered by slight melancholy.

You can’t interact with your guests directly, so it’s a matter of figuring out what you can interact with, what effect it will have, and how the guests move around the house at various points in the evening. Restarting at least once may be necessary, as the whole thing is on a tight timer. The apparent complexity of it really impressed me given the four-hour limit on a Petite Mort game. In general, I found it surprisingly polished and rewarding to play, and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a satisfying bite-sized puzzle game of moderate difficulty.

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.