Larvae

What Is This?

Larvae is a choice-based game starring Isla and Cameron, two recently-graduated college sweethearts. Isla is a biology nerd who’s just received an invitation to a month-long biology camp where all the field’s greatest projects will be on display! Cam is a streamer, so while he’s not terribly interested in biology he’s happy to tag along and show his followers cool stuff. Especially those parasitic worms…

What I Liked

First of all, this game’s settings menu should be standard for everyone going forward and personally speaking, I’m taking notes. A music volume slider, spacing options, plus the ability to change font AND font size? I’m in heaven. If this had a light mode option it would be perfect. (For me. I can’t speak to anyone else’s accessibility needs, of course.)

Secondly, I just really like this game! It’s a nice little blend of romance and horror – it’s not a spoiler to say that the weird larvae in the title are going to do SOMETHING unpleasant, but the relationship between the title characters gets just as much focus. Both elements are well executed, with Cam and Isla feeling like well rounded characters with a very sweet and believable relationship despite the short length of the game. And the horror, well… I’ll leave that up to the reader, but I certainly found it terrifying!

This game also does some interesting playing around with genre and perspective, which I can't discuss without spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
First of all: Genre. This is a romantic game, but whether or not the horror comes into play entirely depends on the choices of the player. The game pretty clearly signposts that drinking from the creepy water glass is a bad idea (at least if you’re playing Cam’s route first), and if you avoid doing so the game is just a cute little story about two people at a summer camp. I’ve always seen a lot of discussion about “genre savvy” in horror, i.e. that a lot of horror stories only work because the protagonists don’t know they’re in a horror story. And if they did, they’d make different choices, and it wouldn’t be horrifying at all! But since this is a horror game, the author has given us, the player, the choice to be genre savvy – at the expense of not getting the horror, which is undoubtedly what most people are here for! I think this is a great way to play around with interactivity and genre expectations. (Of course, this could all be unintentional and the goal was to make the horror hinge on a single innocuous choice, which is also horrifying! I may personally be too genre savvy for my own good, but I like that it works even if you can spot the hints beforehand.)

Secondly: perspective. As I mentioned earlier, you can play out the events of the game through the eyes of both Cam and Isla. This doesn’t change the actual events – the horror/not horror choice is present in both, and events will play out the same way if you make the same choice. The big difference here is that the change of perspective subtly changes the type of horror in play here, which I think is pretty neat!

If you’re Cam and you drink the creepy water, you’re treated to a nasty but straightforward body horror story. If you’re Isla, it’s still a body horror story but it’s much less straightforward. The horror choice is pretty well obfuscated in her route, so from her perspective she sees her partner gradually and then suddenly become strange and ill in a way she has no control over. I think the shift in perspective and the different framing of Cam’s issues that comes with it is very effective and helps keep things interesting, especially since large chunks of dialog don’t change between perspectives. Things got a little more repetitive on the not-horror routes from both perspectives, but given that this is clearly signposted as a horror game I didn’t mind all that much.

What Could Use Improvement?

Mostly, I think this needs a good round of polish. There’s a broken image link in the upper left corner, and there’s a few passages with no links out. I think they may be endings, but if so there’s no text indicating that’s the case.

I also believe the author is ESL so there’s some language issues that could be cleaned up if they got some editing help from a native speaker. This was honestly not a big deal and didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game, but I thought I’d mention it as I know there’s many people on this forum who are willing to help out. Not many people know about that, and editing help can be hard to find elsewhere, so I try to plug this whenever I can!