Amanda Reviews Grand Guignol

Competitions
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OK, so I’m going to play and review at least some of the GGs in Ectocomp this year. The Petite Morts were all great, so I have high expectations. I’ll play them in the order in which Itch presents them to me. THERE MAY BE SPOILERS, although I’ll try very hard not to give anything major away.

First up:

The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb by @Afterward

I’m a big fan of Ryan’s games, and I’ve been making my way through the Little Match Girl games and enjoying them. The basic gameplay is that you travel to other locations (through time, through space, into fantasy worlds, etc) by looking at fire. There are puzzles to solve across all these worlds, and you always meet a cast of disparate characters as Ebanezabeth fights evil.

This outing is a fun one, with a truly scary werewolf nemesis who has taken a page from Medusa: just looking at him causes your eyes to fill up with black goo and you sink into a torpor, going to a really awful headspace of terminal ennui. The puzzles aren’t very difficult, with a few places where I needed to think about things, but nothing that wasn’t sensible. I recommend this for people who like puzzles but aren’t very good at them.

The game was plagued by program errors that didn’t affect gameplay (I’m using Safari and playing in-browser), but were jarring nonetheless because they were everywhere.

Here are a few screenshots:

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I also had some significant disambiguation problems with the cards; it sometimes took multiple commands and getting a disambiguation prompt before I know what the name of the card was and was able to interact with it. This is just a hard thing to do well in parser games, so I sympathize with the headaches multiples can cause. But this did cause me to fight with the parser in an otherwise pretty smooth experience.

It was very disappointing that I won without getting my fortune told; I’d collected all these cards but didn’t have a chance to give them to the fortune-telling guy, and I didn’t want to UNDO and backtrack as far as I would have had to in order to see to that. I’m not big on replay so it would be great if someone could post a part of a transcript where they had their fortune read, I’d appreciate that, as I really do want to see how that plays out.

EDIT: The game has a “keep playing” option at the end that I just totally missed because I suck sometimes. Often. A lot. So never fear: you can absolutely go back and get yer fortune read.

All in all: this game was a little rough around the edges (and I say this as someone who entered a game that is rough around the edges, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite here), but still highly enjoyable, well-designed, and appropriately creepy for this comp.

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Museum of Paranormal Phenomena by @OlafNowacki

The theme of Ectocomp this year is Ghostbusters, and I hope this isn’t the only entry that references the movie! This is a short tribute game that relies absolutely on you knowing who uses the PKE meter and who found a hellscape in the fridge. You could lawnmower your way through it as there aren’t many things in it, discovering what items belong to which characters, but I don’t know how fun that would be for you. But if you saw Ghostbusters many, many times like I did, this will be a cute diversion for you.

Olaf, I am shocked, SHOCKED that the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man did not make an appearance here.

Since there’s not much else to say about this game, I’ll tell a Ghostbusters story. Does anyone remember those karaoke booths they had in the mall where you could go in and sing a song and get a cassette tape of it? I had a friend who wanted everyone to do those singing the Ghostbusters theme song, and she had like 20 versions of the song sung by different people. And she’d record herself singing it and give it to other people, so for a very long time I had a tape of Jenny singing it with a huge lisp: “Ghothbuthterthhhh!” Ah, the 80s.

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I attempted Nick-Neat Trick Treat by @aschultz but couldn’t even get started on it. I have really, really low self-confidence for the rhyming games because I am So. Bad. At. Them. Like, so bad. I can think of things, but they are never right. So I tried a few rhymes with the vegetables and gave up. I won’t be rating this since I didn’t even get started.

I also attempted A Puzzled Soul by @SophosIoun , but it’s a timed game in which you die very quickly if you don’t perform the right actions to escape a monster, and the game was not ready to be released. It’s an Inform game in which almost no synonyms are implemented and the game understands a very narrow range of commands. Pretty much every newbie problem you can imagine is here. It’s clearly the authors’ first try at an Inform project, and it’s a great idea! But it needs lots and lots of work and play testing to be enjoyable. So I quit after about 4 deaths because it wasn’t fun to fight the game. For instance, the text tells me it’s a gold door. But “gold door” isn’t implemented. Forcing a disambiguation error response tells me that it’s a GOLDEN door. Argh. I’m dead already.

This could be really fun with some work, and I would absolutely play a tested and improved version of this game. This is a good place for me to beg people to get play testers before releasing a game. 99% of games will have some problems at release. Hell, my game had a nasty bug in it at release, and there are some rough areas, and this was after 6 play testers. But you can eliminate the vast majority of problems by getting a couple of good testers. This game really needs them.

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Thanks for the kind review, Amanda!

I know. That’s the biggest shortcoming and I’m surprised no one has noticed it before. I was beginning to think I’d get away with it. I’ll fix it as soon as you upload your friend’s recording here!

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Dark Waters on the Night Shift by @dsherwood

This is another entry in the growing genre of parser-like choice games (are those called Twinesformers?) and it’s a really fun one. The setting is terrific-- a water treatment plant at night, and there’s a fair amount of futzing with gizmos, which always makes me happy. The plant is, of course, haunted by the ghost of a guy who died terribly years ago, and that story is neatly framed as a lesson in safety protocols for current employees. And you’re also haunted by a gorgeous, succubus-type entity (I was sorry that I never learned why she was after me. Was it just because of my aloneness in the plant at night? Or am I particularly appealing to succubi?) Your dark desire for this creature is set against the angels of your better nature, and pitted against your desire to free an innocent ghost. Of course I made all the ethical choices because I’m pretty sure that getting all sexy with a demon might be mind-blowing in the short term, but would almost certainly cause problems later.

I had a great time navigating the hellscape of the haunted plant, and although I got a little stuck, I didn’t get frustrated because playing with all the machinery was quite entertaining, and I got myself unstuck without too much trouble. There’s a map that is pretty helpful (and is a nice graphic), although it took some experimentation to orient myself using it-- there’s a lot of back, middle, and front areas that aren’t entirely clear at first to a directionally challenged player like me. But I managed fine.

Overall: a spooky set-up, some good puzzles that are all in the service of solving one bigger puzzle, and zippy writing combine to make this a fun gaming experience.

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Thank you for the wonderful review!

I did try to pay homage to the original Ghostbusters in a couple ways. The super heated ectoplasm and the PCs name is Dana’s baby’s name.

What a blast. Thank you,
Deborah

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This is so weird; I never saw anything like this—maybe it’s a Safari thing?

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Ryan says no. I’m a jerk for not keeping a transcript, so I’m going to try to recreate it with a transcript. I have an uncanny ability to do the one action/series of actions that breaks a game. It’s a gift if I’m testing, a curse if I’m playing.

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Familiar Problems by @Draconis

What a fun and charming game! Without spoiling too much about the story, you are a revenge-seeking blob with some special abilities. As you progress, you gain more abilities, which lead to some wonderful aha moments when you get an ability you need, or find an area you can use an ability in. There are some red herrings: I was disappointed that I never got to fly (which I think was strongly hinted at) and I was downright crushed that SOLILOQUIZE never did anything for me. I got very attached to my blobby form and how I changed over time and was overly excited for each new ability.

The puzzles are great-- I needed a hint to tweak to the revolving bookshelf but otherwise I found it all sensible, with the right level of difficulty. And the writing is just fabulous, funny and quirky and full of enough little details (but not too much) that give you a real sense of place and character. Excellent world-building. An example:

> The Dark Arts Studio is, of course, pitch dark. This area is reserved for the study of things that cannot be practiced in the lighter parts of the castle, such as umbral calculus, blood sacrifice, and photography. The studio is usually full of students listening to Simon and Garfunkel, but is now eerily quiet.

So. Fun.

There were a few rough areas with the clicky/parser hybrid interface. First, clicking on an action and then on the subject required me to click on the subject again, so typing was a better fit for those commands. But the problem with moving back and forth between them is that once you click on something, in order to type you need to click on the command line again first before typing. So going back and forth between them was a little hinky. One of the attractive things about writing a clicky game is (I’m sure) that you don’t have to implement every single object you describe-- you simply make the important things clickable. I confess that as an Inform-ony author this often makes me very jealous. But allowing typed input means that the parser part of my brain wakes up and wants to examine everything, except you can’t. So I’m not entirely sure that the hybrid was necessary or worked well for my brain. Nonetheless, there were times when going back and forth between them suited me well, so I’m not sure what constructive advice I could offer to make it work better. It could simply be that I need to retrain my brain/expectations for this kind of interface, which is certainly worth experimenting with.

I had a great time with this game, which is one of the funnest games I’ve played in the comp so far. There’s a lot of scary/spooky/dour/dark stuff in Ectocomp (including my own), and it’s nice to play something that reminds me that these are games, and games should be fun and entertaining at least some of the time.

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Boo. by Lilie Bagage (no obvious handle)

This is a short game that establishes a genuine sense of place and character in very few words. It also manages to establish a scary atmosphere, mostly through truly scary sound effects. In short: you’re a kid, alone in your bed at night, when the whispers start up. Brrr.

I believe this was translated from French, and the writing of the English version of the game does have an an accent, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s there, along with a couple of typos. There isn’t a lot of text there, with much of the impact coming from those sound effects.

I played through twice trying to see if I could get some different endings and didn’t. They may be there, since a status circle told me I hadn’t found everything. But I didn’t want to click through all the opening pages again. This is something I almost never want to do, and I wish more games would take you back to checkpoints rather than making you click through a lot of opening stuff.

Overall: I enjoyed my time with this creepy little game. There’s not much of it, but it was effective.

2 Likes
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Same! I love Andrew’s games but he is so much smarter than I am. I really enjoyed the opening paragraph. It felt like an intricate rhyming tap dance and then he stops and and gestures because it’s my turn to tap dance but I missed the rehearsal. These games are way awesome for people who are good at word puzzles.

I’m the person nodding along to ten minutes of that puzzle show on NPR where it’s like take a street name in Australia, replace two vowels with the two vowels in a three-letter-named river that abuts that street, then invert two consonants and you’ve got a flavor of ice cream. Send in a postcard with your answer to…. :confused:

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What’s weird is that I’m very, very good at some word puzzles. I consider myself a word puzzle person. I destroy Wordle, quordle, octordle, the NYT crossword, and the Spelling Bee every single day (except I don’t do the crossword from Mon-Wed because, get this, they’re too easy on those days). I KILL at anagrams and played all of Andrew’s anagram games with glee. But rhymes? I just suck at them. It bugs me because I’m a word game person! How dare there be a word game I’m so bad at!

Agreed.

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I’m the opposite, I’m terrible at anagrams and have thus barely attempted any of Andrew’s anagram games, but I love the rhyming ones!

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Since we’re saying nice things about his games (sorry if this is derailing the thread!) I’ve really enjoyed Threediopolis (which inspired my first game) and the chess puzzles, which have taught me a lot about chess!

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Sundown by @OverThinking

Dammit. Of course this got me. Really got me. My mother died almost exactly a year ago, and I’ve made some progress getting past the horrors of her last years of life, and this game reminded me of them.

But. It also made me think of other times with her. If you’ve played the game, the following anecdote will make some sense: When I was in my mid-20s, I had a bad boyfriend. A really bad one. And after I managed to disentangle myself from that, Mom said, “You know, I always kind of hoped you’d bring a nice girl home and then I wouldn’t have to worry about all the terrible things men would do to you.” And I was like, “Mom, women can be serious assholes, too.” But I remember being pretty happy that she would have been OK with my being with a woman, because that wasn’t a general trait in our family. I hadn’t thought of that in years until playing this game, and it made me happy to remember it.

The game. It’s painful, and it’s an excellent representation of the hell children go through when their parents lose their minds. But also of the sweetness that can happen even in the middle of a sundowning nightmare. At the end, Mom could barely talk at all, but occasionally she’d come out with a complete sentence. Most of them made no sense in context, like the time she said there was a door in Philadelphia. But about a month before she died, deep in a hell I couldn’t understand and drugged silly to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else, she said, with perfect clarity, “You love me.” And I said, oh, mom, I really do.

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Thank you so much for the review, and I’m glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, this game suffered a bit from being switched from Petite Mort to Grand Guignol about a week from the deadline—if it had been Grand Guignol from the start, we could have included a lot more scenery. But the links really are a godsend there, in terms of telling players which nouns are useful and which aren’t!

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Wait. So you had ONE WEEK to work on this after 4 hours? First, what an ambitious project for a PM. Second, that changes any picky criticisms I had considerably. A week isn’t long to get something like this done. I’m glad you didn’t make the 4-hour deadline because I would have resented you a little bit for being able to achieve this in 4 hours.

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Yeah, our ambitions somewhat exceeded our limits this time! We figured the limited verb set would help because nothing outside those verbs would have to be considered, and we roughly had things implemented in four hours…but it was a buggy mess with very little flavor, so we spent the last week working nonstop on making it more playable!

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Thank you for this review. The idea for this game came out of some painful moments with my own older family members, and as hard as these experiences are for everyone involved, I’m glad to hear it’s resonated.

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your life, and nothing else by @Lionstooth

A fractured take on a “my shitty apartment” game, with you wandering on fetch quests for your neighbors, who are all more interesting than you are, but who aren’t very interested in you. The game starts off innocuously enough, with you wandering the building, visiting neighbors, refusing to step outside of a small bubble of spaces. You aimlessly wander for a few days, sometimes asked to do things for others, sometimes taking a strange initiative (getting the creepy couple’s mail?), seemingly losing your mind as you go. At the end, the story disintegrates into scary poetry, with everything gone wrong. Everything starts out a little off, and it curdles into downright weirdness at the end.

I can’t say I understood what happened, but I enjoyed the slide into unreality. It felt as if the PC had been drugged (by the water?), but perhaps it was a mental break. Or perhaps the atmosphere of the building and the neighbors haunted you into madness. I thought the name of your building-- Asphodel Arms (I can read backward very well)– might be something so I googled it and found a song which I couldn’t listen to. But I’m curious about whether the name means something.

There were a few oddities in the gameplay, like being able to shower over and over, but they weren’t very intrusive. I don’t know if my choices were significant or not-- I don’t think you can pick the order of tasks for your neighbors, for example. The title page says there are “two endings, sort of,” but since I generally don’t replay unless I feel like I’m going to be able to make substantially different choices right away, I only saw one.

Overall: a moody, weird little game that I quite liked, even if I didn’t always understand it.

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