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.
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.