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1-10 of 10 - Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), January 9, 2024
Do Ya, Do Ya, Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance? Please?, December 24, 2023
Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Let’s imagine IF as a dance between Interaction and Fiction. What else you got to do right now? Imagine with me! Sometimes Fiction leads, establishing steps and rhythms while Interaction follows - the player trying to keep up with the gameplay goals the author is setting, swept along in sure hands. Other times, Interaction leads, the player pushing on the environment and story flaring and prancing in response, the author rewarding intricate moves. Some works are structured to have a single lead, start to finish. Other works trade leads back and forth one or more times in a rapturous full body collaboration, ramping excitement and tension as the music builds and builds and gameplay swirls around narrative around gameplay around… I’m getting the vapors. You get the idea.
What happens though, when NEITHER takes the lead? When Interaction’s attempts to coax that cute story out for a spin, are politely rebuffed. And not even during a slow song, the Cha Cha Slide! Meanwhile, Fiction sits in the corner playing on its phone, too cool to come to the dance floor? A painfully fraught middle school dance happens, that’s what. Everyone has a vague idea they should be doing SOMETHING, but no one has any idea what, so there’s just a lot of foot shuffling and awkward glances. An angsty adolescent Thing of Wretchedness.
You start as an elderly woman, snowbound with the titular Thing, trying to figure out how to poison it. Now, that opening is already super sus. If the first (and almost only) thing you know about a person is that they are ready to poison something, it is fair to question how reliable that person is. Particularly when, through their eyes, the Thing is too horrible to behold, but its actions are just not that threatening. It just seems to be wandering around aimlessly, not so different from the protag. After some exploration I even had cause to ponder, (Spoiler - click to show)hey, this is the husband, isn’t it? It wasn’t. Probably.
The environment is spare - 8 rooms and a mailbox, none of it bursting with objects to interact with. And wandering and exploring reveals next to nothing about the protagonist, the Thing, or suggests tension outside the protagonist’s mind. But you can do two things: (Spoiler - click to show)poison the Thing or mail a letter. Since I was unconvinced of the protagonist’s motivations, I chose the latter and the game ended! By which I mean cut to new layer of narrative without resolving anything. And it EXPLICITLY told you that the former would likely not work.
huh.
So I restarted, knocked around a bit, continued to not trust the protag’s sense of threat when tangible evidence was lacking, and got nowhere. Eventually I consulted the walkthrough. Turns out (Spoiler - click to show)the Thing was a menace. It could get angry and start attacking and breaking things. First playthrough I had heard loud noises, but the environment seemed to weather things fine, so I felt no peril. Certainly I shared the room with the Thing often and suffered no harm or even unease. The trick was to wait, (Spoiler - click to show)and maybe poison it (even though the first failure ending told me not to bother!). At that point though, is it maybe acting in self defense? Don’t DO anything, just wait a lot. Until a randomizer exploded. Then, if you didn’t die you could get a vital object to unlock a final area where ANOTHER object led you to a better ending.
Well, the text claimed it was better. Certainly your interaction with the object was opaque and not obviously problem-solvey, but it did? It led to another layer of metatext that only obliquely resolved things for the old woman you’d spent all your time with. The work is apparently part of a series but claims no knowledge of the rest is needed. Maybe not, but missing knowledge of stakes, consequences and cause and effect should be provided somewhere.
I’m a horror guy, October is my primetime. The title made promises to me. My goodwill (and Engagement!) is a horror game’s to lose. Here, the gameplay decisions were its undoing. The protagonist was afraid, that was clear. As a player I was at a loss to see why, and actually suspicious of her fear. While my suspicion of the protagonist was kind of fun, it was deeply counterproductive to the narrative. The work really needed to sell the Thing’s menace better, with concrete, observable consequences outside the protagonist’s mind. To some extent, reliance on a randomizer may exacerbate the problem. The author cannot guarantee a sense of menace if they delegate the threat to a die roll. Without a walkthrough, I’m not sure I would have had the patience or inclination to wait around (doing nothing!) to see if it got worse. Getting exactly the WRONG message from my first failure didn’t help either.
The work had a moderate amount of unimplemented nouns and disambiguation issues between clocks and boxes. In a work so spare they stood out as Notable, where a more engaging work might better weather the glitches. I will say, as a horror fan, evoking Middle School Dance was maybe the most chilling thing about it.
Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1hr, 2/3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy
Would Play After Comp?: No, Middle School was DIRE
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Unsatisfying ending(s), December 16, 2023 A Thing of Wretchedness is a horror “sandbox” parser, set in an empty farmstead in the middle of winter, away from any life, some time around the 70s(?). You play as an older woman, who having lost her husband recently(ish), deals with grief… and a wretched thing roaming the house. You want (need?) to get rid of this things, but how?
The game includes an external walkthrough with general guidelines on achieving one of the 3 endings.
The start is pretty intriguing with a more mundane take on horror, by having an indescribable thing roaming around your house, not actively hurting you, but also not letting you feel at ease either - you can’t bear to look at it. It is made pretty obvious there is some sort of relationship between you and the thing, in that it won’t hurt you and you kind of take care of it. Exploring the different rooms and its items may help get an idea (nice details there!).
For some reason, after months - or maybe years - of being tortured by its presence, you want to get rid of it now. Your first idea would be to poison it, as the introduction explains, though you are not too keen on hurting the thing either… In this regard, the games gives you multiple paths to take care of the thing, with some options more violent than others. This is the sandbox aspect of the game.
Some endings, especially the one which supposedly gives the most context, rely on timing and RNG. You set up an action that requires the thing to do something, but it may take a while or the thing may end up doing something completely useless, or hurt you. This becomes frustrating pretty quickly, as resetting the action sometimes takes so loooong.
I was also a bit disappointed with the endings too, as they don’t really answer anything at the end - the open-ended-ness leaving you with more questions than answers, especially if you don’t get the ending that provides some information. I still have no idea what was that box about…
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Systems of oppression, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.
While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).
Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.
The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Dealing with an indescribable horror in your house, procedurally, November 22, 2023This 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.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Good horror vibes, unsatisfying ending, November 18, 2023I 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.
- jaclynhyde, November 16, 2023
- Edo, November 6, 2023
- Zape, October 14, 2023
- verityvirtue (London), October 4, 2023
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