Beneath the Weeping Willow

I missed the author's entries in IFComp because they felt like the sort of thing I wouldn't want to judge at the moment. On the strength of BWW, I'm quite motivated to go back and give them a look. (I planned to look at everything in the top twenty.) In BWW, you are a ghost who haunts a boarding house until someone finds your secret. This year, the guests are Lou and Amelia, and perhaps they'll be the ones to uncover your secret.

So why do you need a human to help? Because you're a ghost and can't really grab anything. You can only blow the wind, and then only on Halloween. It's 8:30 PM, so you have three and a half hours, or you would, if Lou and Amelia didn't go to bed before ten. There's a small keepsake hidden in a secret room, and it holds a secret, but you can't open it. So you're reduced to making stuff fall over or making a clock chime. Each thing gets different reactions from the humans. You need to lead them to certain rooms, too, before critical actions.

It's not a very huge house, but it doesn't need to be, and while I'd play a bigger version, I enjoyed not having to do a whole ton of things. Manipulating The Lodgers is not too hard, and it's pretty clear what works and doesn't. There's no time, but rather, them seeing they're a bit tired and then going to bed, and then you miss your chance on Halloween. To finally break the loop. There are a few things to do in order, which I don't want to spoil, and since it's not a very big game, you won't lose much if you run out of time. In fact, the ending where you lose makes the winning ending feel more satisfying once you get it right. But the story makes a lot of sense either way. I missed the best ending the first time through, got it the second, and then revisited a location outside the house with my third. (I was more confident where to go, in what order. The right ending fully validates the title, but seeing everywhere clinches things.)

So it's a really good use of choice script, which may seem a bit hard with the 4-hour time limits, but it doesn't worry about stuff like player stats, which would muddy up the story here.

This isn't the first story of investigating your death or manipulating people who are still alive, but it reminded me of Caelyn Sandel's Light My Way Home. They are similar length, but LMWH is a parser game. In that, you're incorporeal being that acts on machines, not people. So it's really cool to see how these two take a basic premise in very different directions and do so very well.