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ZIT

by Amanda Walker profile

Horror
2022

Web Site

(based on 7 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

A freshly divorced mother of two, at age 50 you are preparing for your first job interview in twenty years. There's a problem. A big one.

A petite mort game written in 4 hours for Ectocomp 2022.

Play time 5-10 minutes.


Game Details


Awards

12th Place, La Petite Mort - English - ECTOCOMP 2022

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Number of Reviews: 3
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A brief, pustulent game about a horrendous zit , November 14, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This is a surprisingly polished game for 4 hours (I've said that a lot this comp, I wonder if this shows that I don't use my time as wisely as others do).

You have a job interview coming up, but you also have a massive zit! It's described in excruciating detail. You're in a bathroom with a little but a few things in the drawers and your cell-phone.

To me, the real appeal of the game is in the insight into your loved ones. Each one you call has a different reaction, some of them showing off a poor moral character, others a sweet or charming one.

The other big component is dealing with the zit itself. I had some trouble near the end with the game saying I hadn't done something when I had already done it, but it fixed itself pretty soon. Overall, a strong entry.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Real-world body horror, November 21, 2022
by Draconis
Related reviews: Ectocomp 2022

The opening sequence conveys two crucial things. One, this looks like an Inform game (Parchment’s classic font and color scheme). And two, the horror is going to hit close to home. “You just let year after year pass…” is one of my greatest fears. So we’re off to a great start.

The game is short and sweet. You’re in the bathroom preparing for your first job interview in decades, reflecting on your life, and trying to cover up this huge zit before you go out in public. Your main options are calling the various contacts in your cell phone and trying to cover it up with the materials at hand. The game ends when you finally feel ready to face the world.

There are two different endings (that I found), and the implementation is quite solid for a Petite Mort game. More importantly, though, this game does a great job of using the illusion of interactivity to emphasize the exact opposite. A parser game offers you the opportunity to do anything in the world and that just shows how few options you really have. The cell phone that connects you to the rest of the world actually underscores your isolation from it. It’s a great way to avoid the combinatorial explosion of a vast, fully-implemented world (bathrooms being infamously difficult to implement in parser games) and also to use the fundamental nature of the medium to emphasize the story being told. And then in the end, you do, in fact, still have the power to determine the ending. The overall effect is quite nice.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Get outta my face, November 5, 2022
by jakomo
Related reviews: ectocomp2022

Another one-puzzle, one-room parser game about battling a terrifying body part, like Zombie Eye. This time it's the horror of a face spot discovered in your bathroom mirror as you prepare for a job interview. Use the contents of your bathroom cabinet, and your phone, to save the day. Lots of fun details about the player-characters life, household, family and personal relationships. Multiple amusing endings.

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ZIT on IFDB

Recommended Lists

ZIT appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Parent protagonists by Kinetic Mouse Car
Games where you play as characters with offspring.

Polls

The following polls include votes for ZIT:

Microparsers by Tabitha / alyshkalia
The discussion in this thread, from which I've borrowed the term "microparser" (thanks Pinkunz!), led me to want to collect small parser games. I'm thinking of ones that fit what's described in the thread--generally taking less than 30...




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