Open Flame

An enigmatic entry, with an interesting interpretation of Hozier’s Arsonist’s Lullaby, as you play some sort of prisoner in an abbey/temple, trying to escape. You are presented with a few choices, some of which will have greater consequences than other - leading you towards one out of 5 endings.

The writing reminded me of text-adventure games, with its fast pace and concise prose, and the limited wording in actions. It gripes you, not letting you go until the end. Even then, the lack of answers from the questions it raises will probably prompt you to restart to get through another path. For me, it was the strange differently-coloured text line, which may or may not be voices in our head?

To follow the arsonist vibes (which you can try to emulate in-game), the interface includes a smoky animated background, and desaturated/low-opacity text (as if there was smoke hiding it).

I liked this game. The presentation was neat, with real-time smoke in the background over at-your-own-pace text (I'd love to see more of this in games that use real time elements, letting me read as fast or slow as I like while other live stuff happens in the background).

You play as...well, you don't really know. It seems you're in a kind of group, at first, with text represented in different colors and alignments.

You have to escape a burning room in a temple. Everything is chaos.

You can play multiple times, and it can take quite a while to figure out what's going on. But everything built on each other, and I found it quite clever.

I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, as I usually use the 5th star for 'would I play again?' but technically I already played twice, so I'll give it 5 stars.

It starts with one of those classic "you wake up confused and bound in an empty room" openings, but things quickly go haywire from there. As you eventually find out, your job is (Spoiler - click to show)containing demons for a temple by serving as their human vessel. All you have to do is let yourself be bound, then sleep in peace. Easy, right? But something's set the temple on fire, and the voices in your head are getting louder...

The game makes good use of its situation - at the start your past is uncertain, your identity is in flux, and there's multiple confusing voices in your head telling you what they think you should do. But as you play, you realize what your situation is and that makes the "right" choices more clear. In other words, this is one of those games that benefits hugely from repeat playthroughs. I played it four times and got, I think, all the endings. I think I can safely say (Spoiler - click to show)the voices in your head are supposed to be some degree of ambiguously evil. After I realized this I stopped murdering people, though to my disappointment it didn't seem to impact the endings at all.

(Spoiler - click to show)Demonic possession is kind of overplayed, and there are slightly unfortunate implications with the whole "people who hear voices are psychotic murderers" thing, but I'm personally fond of "voice in your head" narratives, and it did work well with the song.

Took me maybe ten minutes to get all the endings (lots of repeat text between the different paths). Having more story differences between the paths, or more elaboration on the world in general/what exactly are the voices in your head? could make the game feel more substantial. It was fun nonetheless.