I’ll start introducing myself to random people on the street with this honorary title. Thank you.
3 Likes
Lucid , by Caliban’s Revenge
I picked this game mostly for the fact that the author said it was interactive poetry, which of course is the way to get me to play a game. Also, the cover art is great.
In the “New Authors” thread, Ru said of this game, “I wanted it to be a kind of interactive poetry about coming to terms with trauma.” Interactive poetry it certainly is, and it’s often very effective, with some great imagery and beautiful writing. And it’s dark. The images are always going for a nightmarish effect, and there are some outright horror tropes here, like a witch with creepy salamanders. I don’t find standard horror images like this to be very effective, and this was the weaker ending, as I felt I’d seen a lot of those images before. The other route I took is where I saw the connection to “coming to terms with trauma.” In this ending, the traumatic memories of a bad childhood experience eat you alive, and it was much, much better. This felt new, and was genuinely upsetting and scary.
The writing is a little uneven, as long pieces of verse so often are, but it tends to work more than it doesn’t. An occasional image strikes a false note with me, like “Boxes of cereal, uniform masks of anarchy adorning the face of every packet.” Anarchy? I can’t twist my own experiences of cereal boxes to represent anything but conformity. But then then are beautiful moments, images that will stay with me, like “the estate opens to accept /You as if it was a mother that/Never had any other choice.” And choice is the clickable word. Gorgeous and evocative. I wish it had been through one more tester, as there were occasional typos, which are far more glaring in poetry than they are in prose.
I was able to get a few different paths in about half an hour, and the author should be impressed that I tried it as many times as I did, because I really don’t ever replay games. But I did want to see more of this, and the author made it easy to do so by simply taking you back to the beginning rather than asking if you wanted to restart. There were some paths that ended nearly immediately, and I got two that took about 10-15 minutes each to get through. I never did get an option to use anything I was carrying, which was a pity, but I don’t want to replay the exact same choices to try and find a branch that lets me use things. So that’s where this game ran up against my dislike for replay. I was fine with taking completely new paths, or replaying the first few choices, but after that, I’m not going to go back to try and find a missed branch. Apologies to Ru for this-- it’s a personal quirk that keeps me from experiencing many games fully.
Overall, I heartily recommend you try this-- I really liked it and think it’s a impressive first game for Ru (and I love the name Caliban’s Revenge-- I envision Prospero’s blood on the rocks). Its tone is bleak, its endings (at least the ones I got) were all tragic, and its language is doleful, but man, does that all create an immersive mood. Lucid is a hallucinatory experience, a fever dream of a nighttime journey through a city with barely sheathed claws, stalking you as you wander its streets.
Next up: Nose Bleed, by Stanley W. Baxton
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Thanks for the review Amanda, I found your take very informative and constructive. Thanks for engaging with my nightmarish little world and making such thoughtful comments 
3 Likes
Nose Bleed, by Stanley W. Baxton
I confess that I saw this game while scrolling through the Comp entries on the first day, and was bummed out that the author hadn’t posted in the New Authors thread, because a game called “Nose Bleed” just has to be awesome. Happily, Stanley chimed in a day or so ago on that thread, which gave me permission to play it now.
And it IS awesome. It’s another Texture game, at which I am now an old hand, and it indeed appears at first to be about nosebleeds. Constant, heavy, embarrassing, public nosebleeds. But all that blood is really a metaphor for extreme social anxiety. I am no stranger to social anxiety, although I have to say I felt pretty superior to the PC, who has it way worse than I do. Mostly I just say things (all the time) that I wish I could snatch out of the air and stuff back into my mouth, and then I slink away. Amazingly, I still manage to make friends who just sigh a lot.
Anyway, the PC here is paralyzed by feelings of social inadequacy, self-loathing, and paranoia (is it paranoia?). There are many games that tackle various mental health issues, and mostly they are going for educating the player and a you-can-overcome-it message. This one definitely edges into that territory, but in a way that is more interesting than your standard PSA-about-mental-health game. The nosebleeds are extremely gross, so be warned, pearl-clutchers. The minimalistic, stark graphics are fantastic, and the writing is good (a few typos, but the PC is such a mess that somehow the typos added to the game). It’s an extremely uncomfortable game that had me squirming in my seat. So I loved it.
There were lots of choices, but I only played through once (about 15 minutes), and I really, really didn’t want to play through it again because a.) I hate replay and b.) I loved my first play through and didn’t need anything else. Stanley appears to have a bevy of projects on Itch, so there’s probably some familiarity with general game design, but I think this was probably made in the same workshop as the other Texture games in the Comp. It’s the standout Texture game for me.
If you like uncomfortable, gross game experiences with insight into social anxiety issues, then you should definitely play this one. If you have a tender stomach, steer clear (or just suffer through the 15 minutes it will take you, because it’s really worth it). I won’t say anything more about it because you should come to it without too many preconceptions. This is a highlight of the Comp so far for me. Thanks for a wonderfully awful and creative little game, Stanley!
Next up: Inside, by Ira Vlasenko
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Inside, by Ira Vlasenko
I have really good associations with the name Inside, because I absolutely adored Playdead’s game by the same name. I love the cover art of Ira’s game, and it’s about witches, so I’m in.
I had a hard time reviewing this game because my experience of it was so mixed. The setup is fantastic: you’re a witch saved from a witch trial (it seems the local villagers have had enough of you) by another witch, who takes you out of real time and space and into her mind (which is a weird and roomy place). There are a lot of choices to make here: whether you are good or evil, where to go, how to deal with antagonistic NPCs. So the interactivity is very high, which is important to me in a game. But each scene felt disconnected from the others, and from the overall story. What are we trying to achieve here? Just escaping? I did replay this because my first play through lasted only a few minutes, and the game just stopped. I had no sense of closure or of an ending, so I thought it might be a bug. On my second time, I discovered a puzzle: making potions in an alchemy lab, and that’s fun.
But I accidentally prepared one ingredient wrong, and I can’t see a way to undo that, and I think I’d have to start again to do it correctly, which I’m not going to do, as I don’t remember how I got to the alchemy lab. So after flailing around a bit in the lab, I stopped playing, since there are no options to restart that section or leave.
There are some excellent elements here: a dreamy feeling, choices that feel consequential, a genuinely creepy atmosphere. But my experience was hampered by the disjointed flow and by interface problems. I would have happily undone my alchemical mistake and kept playing until I made the potion, but I couldn’t. I do have to note that there were grammar and spelling problems, along with occasionally strange syntax which makes me think English is not this author’s first language. If so, this was mostly very well written, but could have used some more testers who are native English speakers.
I do recommend you give this game a try-- I suspect there is a lot more to it that I didn’t see, and I liked a lot of what I saw. But if you find yourself in the alchemical lab-- don’t mess around with making a potion unless you know what the recipe is!
I may or may not get back to reviewing IFComp games in this thread, as ECTOCOMP has begun. All the Petite Mort games there are calling to me, just as each individual Pringle’s potato chip calls to me from a tube of greasy goodness.
6 Likes