Taghairm

by Chandler Groover profile

Horror
2015

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Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
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4 star:
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3 star:
(11)
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Number of Ratings: 25
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- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), May 20, 2016

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An experiment in player agency and in creating an uncomfortable feeling, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: IF Comp 2015

I played this long (but purposely repetetive) IFComp 2015 Twine game twice, about two weeks apart.

Let's just say what it's about now; this is a game whose experience does not depend on spoilers.

You are enacting an ancient scottish ritual where you are trying to summon a demon by roasting cats alive over several days.

In the game, you repeatedly click on the same thing over and over again, with some procedural text generation changing some minor details.

The game changes over time, but it takes a long, long time to do so. In the mean time, you can, as I did the first time, just start letting cats go and give up on the whole ritual. In fact, it may be cathartic for some (including myself) to play again and just let all the cats ago.

You have to roast somewhere between (Spoiler - click to show)40-100 cats to reach the ending.

I did not listen with audio, as I never do, but many say it contributes to the experience, for good or for ill.

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- Edward Lacey (Oxford, England), December 20, 2015

- Aryore, December 12, 2015

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Questions about the nature of sacrifice, November 21, 2015

Taghairm is a game about magic. Real magic -- blood magic, the kind performed by desperate people in desperate circumstances. The kind that leads you to a secluded barn, where you perform an atrocious act without knowing whether or not it will work, because you are desperate enough that a chance at the reward can drive you to make terrible sacrifices.

Practically, it is a game about roasting cats. The ritual performed in the game is historical -- as many awful things are -- and the narrative that unfolds is essentially a dramatization of the only written account of the ritual being performed.

As such, Taghairm is not so much a narrative as it is a simulation. You are invited to play the role of one of these desperate people, committing a desperate act, and the effectiveness of the game really hinges on what you bring to it: How you feel about the things that happen, and what those feelings mean.

For me, it is a game about sacrifice - in both a literal and sybmolic sense. It's a game about what happens when you've come too far to turn back. It's a game about achieving what you want, only to lose everything in the process. It's a game about forgetting what it was you had even wanted to begin with.

What makes it really effective to me is the design. It's not immediately obvious, but this game was really created with care. There are multiple sound files for atmosphere. The UI takes up a tiny amount of the available screen, filling the gaps with darkness -- enforcing the idea that you are isolated, huddled around this terrible fire in the dark. The text, sometimes, moves quickly, events happening beyond your control; and then it stops, refusing to budge until you make a choice. For every cat, you are given the choice to stop the ritual (Spoiler - click to show)-- and to learn that whatever it was you were trying to achieve is now, forever, impossible. You can take a more active role, grabbing the next cat, turning it on the spit. Or you can force your cousin to do the heavy lifting while you stoke the fire. These are not small choices. They inform the world you occupy and your identity within it. They create the simulation.

And, if you let it -- if you don't cringe away but instead allow yourself to stay a while in these people's shoes -- they raise questions that are very worthwhile.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty horrible, but a bit too repetitive, November 20, 2015

By now everyone know what Taghairm is about, right? I liked the game, and my experience was a bit different from other people, so I might as well talk about my experience.

First of all I had no idea this kind of thing existed, and it is SO messed up. For some reason I really like (Spoiler - click to show)messed-up, creepy, horrific Middle-Ages beliefs (changelings are another good one), so this was really interesting and neat! The sound atmosphere is really cool too, and adds a lot to the experience.

The game is very repetitive mechanically, and you (Spoiler - click to show)burn cat upon cat upon cat. But I felt like the horror you feel the first time starts to diminish after a few, and then is worn off by the end; I very quickly entered a pattern where I'd click almost rythmically on the links, barely pausing to read. This might be on purpose, and (maybe I'm thinking too much) may be meant as commentary on mechanized evil, and how easy it is to remove yourself emotionally from actions when they become repetitive. But if that was the purpose, I'm not sure it came across very well: basically my reaction was "ugh (Spoiler - click to show)I'm killing cats... why am I killing cats? I guess this will make sense later? Ok, I'll keep going, humor the game to see what it has to say in the end" - and then it was just about following whatever motions the game would make me follow.

By the end it's like I didn't believe the game anymore, I think I felt very removed, in a very conscious way, from the game. The voices near the end and the thunderstorm made some of the creepiness come back for me, but I wish it hadn't gone; I wish the game had been either more concise and more focused, or with more variety.
In particular, another thing that removed me from the game was that I quickly figured out that the game generated cat descriptions at random - if the game can keep generating interchangeable cats, why should I care about them? They're just 0s and 1s. If the description had more, sorry, fluff to them ("the scared cat is looking at you with big eyes", "the half-dead cat is twitching and his eyes meet yours", "the angry cat scratches you which wakes you up a little"), I might have cared a bit more; or if there was an actual direction to them, I'd have tried to see what the next cat showed me about the world or myself or my state; or if the intensity was heightened or the game kept going further. (If that makes sense?)

As is, I felt like the game heightened things by small amounts that had too much space in between them; I wish the moments where things changed had been bigger (big changes, big punches to the gut, new sounds, screen gets smokier, etc) or that the space between them had been shorter. Other than that, it's creepy, well-done, with nice sound effects, and a nice Halloween game - if you want to provoke very loud reactions in a group of friends.

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- E.K., November 19, 2015

- Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia), November 17, 2015

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 9, 2015

- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), November 8, 2015

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Brutal, sparse, if a little vague, November 6, 2015
by verityvirtue (London)
Related reviews: IFComp 2015

Disclaimer: This game depicts violence (specifically, animal abuse) explicitly.

Taghairm is a dark Twine game with a brutal, sparse way of words, which I liked. The writing is purposeful and builds atmosphere well - it implies a lot from very little. It suggests the ghost of a storyline: something (or somebody) has been lost, and this… this that you go to your cousin’s field to do, is the only way.

What moved this game from linguistic beauty to visceral horror, though, was the emotional stake. The game punishes the player at first for wanting to disagree with what the NPC is doing by not allowing the story to progress, and by having an NPC who dismisses your misgivings, trapping you firmly in the horror storyline.

There is a key decision-making point at a certain repeating routine which essentially allows you to choose what outcome you want. The more brutal path ends up showing the toll of the ritual on the PC and the NPC. It never returns to the context in the beginning, the reason why the PC did this in the first place, which made the story weaker than it could have been. Perhaps, in the search for your heart’s desire, you lose everything else, and you lose everything that made that desire so worthwhile in the first place.

I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, I found the visceral horror truly upsetting. On the other hand, though, the feeling of dread was weakened by the (Spoiler - click to show)repetitive sounds which lost its impact after a while because they were so predictable and the vagueness as to why the PC was doing that. This is a game which stayed with me.

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), October 31, 2015

- BlitzWithGuns, October 18, 2015

- Sobol (Russia), October 12, 2015

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
For once, actually horrifying horror, October 12, 2015
by Petter Sjölund (Malmö, Sweden)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2015

This actually scared me, something that can't be said of many horror games. The historical background adds a lot of depth, texture and terror. Despite the gruesome theme, it leaves most of the gory details to the imagination, and repetition and monotony are used to great effect.

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- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), October 10, 2015


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