1 4 the $

What a strong start to the competition! I am personally quite a fan of grotesque and dark subjects, but this one portrayed it very cleverly. I liked the general atmosphere of what is going on, and the mold really works well.

I adored the You will be loved (I think it was?) message, this chanting feeling, this overthrow, and the game’s flow worked well. I didn’t realise I really had any choices, it felt like a great flow. Also positive because I got the ending where I stand on the building and the spores take me over, which is a really good ending.

One thing that could have been a little better was the actual online bit. Although it was very tight and I understood exactly what was happening, I wanted that part of the story to develop a little longer in each story.

Preambule: this was a good game that borked my brain a bit and put my thoughts in disorder. There is sense somewhere in this review, I think.

1 4 the $ is a Twine story about despair, the want to belong and feel loved, and manipulation. With a gloomy setting, where you play as a probably mentally ill, unemployed recluse, the game explores dark and confronting subjects: consumption in all its form. Going through the ups and downs of life (but mainly the downs) at the bottom of the barrel, you follow the protagonist's "last" days as they stumble upon a new crypto get-rich-quick scheme all the while dealing with a run-down lodging taken over by (a probably) sentient mould.
I say "last days" because of where the different endings take you.

The depiction of consumption in 1 4 the $ is multifaceted and very intriguing. From the literal aspect of the player consuming to sustain (even if it means eating literal mould), the mould taking over the protagonist's body until it consumes it all, online communities taking advantages of its members for entertainment, crypto shills targetting exploiting the gullible and disadvantaged. Everything is linked in some kind of way, working against/with each other to form the story, helping us (the reader) understand how the protagonist got where they are and the choice they make.

And on a level, it does not seem "bad", as the protagonist yearns for community themself, to feel understood or maybe just recognised and love, to feel like they have some sort of purpose or goal beyond feeling sorry for themself. In one path, they seem content to lose themself just to be a part of a thing. Or because they just can't fight anymore. Which ever depiction of the protagonist you end up with is incredibly bleak.

I quite liked the atmospheric background, with the glowing light animation, whose colour will depict a different part of the house, or the formatting of the text replicating social media platforms like Reddit or Discord, as well as the uneasy screens when you "talk" to the mould/yourself. The simple design added quite a bit to the disturbing vibe of the game.
Just small accessibility thing: the blue links are often not contrasted enough against the background.

This game is about someone experiencing the worst the world has to offer: isolation, hunger, infection, homophobia, perpetuating cycles of abuse, and, worst of all: cryptocurrency.

It’s a short game, well-designed with animated background transitions and varying fonts and colors.

You play as a recluse without stable unemployment who has recently fled a discord server where they were picked on and called various slurs. They find hope in a new discord for a cryptocurrency.

While all of this is happening, their house becomes increasingly moldy.

I didn’t put it together until now, because while playing I thought these two storylines were disjoint, but the spread of mold and the cycle of crypto’s crash and boom have a lot in common and those parallels must be what the other was on about.

There are several kinds of creepy moments here, from strange questions to plenty of physical horror. The slurs made me most uncomfortable; it was clear, though, that their use was not positive and was reflective of the ill mental state of the character.

Overall, a thoughtful game. Reminded me a lot of when crypto first got really big; I looked up how it worked and couldn’t figure out how it would be sustainable due to the need to keep long lists of past transactions in each interaction, so I tried to code up my own and got it to work, and my dean decided to use it as fake currency for his econ class (we made proof of work really easy so that it wouldn’t destroy the environment). I thought it would make it clear to the students how silly crypto was, but they got really into it. But the mining was annoying so they eventually abandoned the crypto part and made it fiat by putting it on the dean’s spreadsheet, which pretty much sums up the usefulness of crypto in real life (it’s not).

Anyway, a good horror game but definitely check the trigger warnings.