The Waiting Room

In TWR, you're a new hire at a nursing home, and the patients seem to be dying more painfully than you'd expect. There are unexplained incidents and mentions of shadow people, but your coworkers don't believe it. Until they sort of do, if you push them to investigate things they've grown acclimated to.

On your first day you meet a fellow nurse named Austin who tells you not to bother with Ethel, who is always complaining. Whether or not you do, and whether you determine her complaints to be real, is one of the meaningful decisions in the story. There are other things to do to verify Ethel's complaints, which seem like generic "old folks whining" stuff, but of course, TWR wouldn't be very exciting if that were it.

The next meaningful choice is when you are sent on a night shift with a nurse named Maria and have to face a Shadow Person. Maria sort of believes in ghosts and sort of doesn't, and after a few sequences that turn out to be dreams, you're faced with the fact that, yes, the Shadow People exist. Who they are and what they want is revealed if you know where to look in the dark wing of the hospital you've been relegated to. The mystery isn't a particularly tricky one, intellectually, but there's always an obstacle once you think you've done the right thing. Though I wasn't surprised, things fit pretty tidily with the introduction, and I realized I cared about the other patients in Ethel's wing as well.

I got the good ending the first time through, basically by paying attention and not being be a jerk. The story grabbed me enough, I felt like trying for the not-so-good one, though it was hard making some choices knowing what would likely happen immediately. I even worried whom my bad acts might take down. Both main endings turned out quite satisfying, and while writing this review I thought a bit about the dead nurse you find and what sort of person they must have been. My guess is, they'd have to be meaner than Austin. It was disquieting.

Perhaps hard-core horror aficionados might find it TWR too facile, but I was engaged, and the depiction mentioned in the content warnings weren't overwhelming to me. My brain said it'd be easy to blow off anything supernatural in a nursing home because conditions there are bad anyway, but TWR had enough emotional pull to overcome that.

I hate backhanded compliments, so I hope this is sincere: it's workmanlike, and it works, and quite bluntly sometimes I'd rather not have a story try to blow me away. This is a work by someone who knows what they're doing and how to tell a story without trying too little or much, but they didn't seem to shoot for the stars this time. It feels polished enough, but not shiny, and that's better than the reverse. I'd be happy with another work like this in IFComp 2022, but I also sense the writer can do more.