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Contains A Thing of Wretchedness/A​_Thing​_of​_Wretchedness.gblorb
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A Thing of Wretchedness

by AKheon profile

Horror
2023

(based on 6 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

A lonely farmstead... A troubling situation... No easy answers.

This is a parser-based sandbox horror adventure with multiple endings. It takes place in the setting of Ascension of Limbs, but it's intended to be a stand-alone story that doesn't require any foreknowledge. Contains scenes some may find disturbing.


Game Details


Awards

53rd Place - tie - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)

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Number of Reviews: 2
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Dealing with an indescribable horror in your house, procedurally, November 22, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This was a fun little game about an unfun situation.

I think I experienced this game in the best way possible, as I am a fan of the game it is connected to (Ascension of Limbs) and I got the most interesting ending first. If I had experienced it any other way, I’d probably have not liked it as much.

You play as a woman in a house that has been tormented by a thing for a long time. Years, maybe? Maybe not.

Something is in your house, a wretched thing. The game doesn’t really expand on what that is. I imagined something like a mix between a baby, a Slitheen from Dr Who, and a silverfish from Minecraft.

Most of the action in the game is generated on the fly as the wretched thing performs various gross deeds. There are a few keys ways to interact with it, but other than that there’s not much to do.

That’s probably the main thing I didn’t like. Tons of items are in the game, but almost all of them have a message like ‘that’s not important now’ or ‘you don’t need that’. That makes sense from a scoping point of view, but I felt a little sad every time an interesting item turned out not to be usable.

But I liked the writing. And the ‘good’ ending really explained a lot about one of Ascension of Limbs’ main mechanics, so that’s what I liked best about this.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Good horror vibes, unsatisfying ending, November 18, 2023
by alyshkalia
Related reviews: IFComp 2023

I liked the “mundane horror” vibe of this game, with the eponymous wretched thing wandering around the PC’s house but not posing any active threat. The gameplay, then, is mostly exploring the house and piecing together what might have happened to get you to this point. Of course, you can also--as the game strongly suggests you should--poison the wretched thing and see how that plays out, and in fact that is necessary in order to get the ending that reveals the most information. Unfortunately, this additional backstory still doesn’t shed much light on the situation, and in fact introduces a new mystery that is left unsolved. On the whole, I think the mood is the game's most successful aspect, while the story and pacing don't quite hold up.

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