Boo.

Boo. is a short spooky story, made in Moiki, in which you investigate the strange whispering voices you start hearing in the middle of the night (even though they keep asking you to leave).

While the search is fairly simple and to the point (the main block in the path can be resolved within a couple of turns), it excels in creating a genuinely atmospheric creepy environment, through both the simple dark interface, sparse and uneasy background sound/SFX, but most importantly the voiced dithered whispers. The voice creeps and disappears, climbs up your spine and runs back down double speed, jumps and leaves you just as fast - making you expect it at any turn to scream until kingdom come.

This game knows what is it doing, and doing it it extremely well. It keeps you on your toes, both bare and rich in content, on point with timing, and doesn’t stay its welcome.

This is a moiki game, designed to introduce English speakers to the format. I’ve seen it used in a lot of French games before; this particular game shows off some of the text effects and of course the new audio effects very well, but undersells the other powers of the engine a little bit, which can do very complex state tracking and branching.

I think ‘deliciously frightful’ could well describe this story; it has constant sounds, the majority of which are frightful whispers. It reminds me of an audio version of the children’s hidden picture book where there’s a creepy creepy gate with a creepy creepy house with creepy creepy stairs and a creepy creepy box…the anticipation builds as the whispers become more intense. I kept wondering, ‘will there be a jumpscare now? How about now? How about now???’

So the emotion was there, and the polish. The overall story was fairly small and simple, but any longer would likely have made the audio element too big or too annoying to record.

I enjoyed this, so thanks!

It's short, but I think that works in its favour given the kind of "atmospheric experience" game it is, and it performs that task quite well! It jumps into the story and holds you there for a little while until it finishes playing out. The sound effects are used to great effect to create a very creepy atmosphere and build tension about what you'll find next. If you're prone to being creeped out, I wouldn't play it at night with the lights out.

This game did actually cause me to go and check out the Moiki system that was used to build it.