As I did last year, I’ll review every Petite Mort game in this thread, about 5 at a time. For those of you new to the format, Petite Morts must be made in 4 hours, which is like 4 minutes when you’re doing it. Nearly every game is going to have issues of bugginess, incompleteness, typos, unimplemented things, etc. The fun is in seeing what people chose to focus on with their time, and how much game they managed to get done.
I’ll use the randomizer and save the games I tested for last. Without further ado, the first 5:
Untitled Ghost Game, by Damon L Wakes
Summary
This was a great way to start a comp. Really funny, with great choices, You’re a ghost, and you don’t want new living people in your house. So you have a certain amount of time to choose what kind of ghosty pranks you’ll play before the new owner of the house comes home. Some choices are scarier than others, some take more time than others, and when you’ve run out of time, you see what effect all this has on the new owner. I played through twice making different choices but got the same ending, so I’m not sure if there are other endings. The writing here is great, there’s real gameplay (which is the hardest thing to accomplish in 4 hours) and overall I loved this.
Martyr Me, by OverThinking
Summary
I loved this. It’s gross, scary, gory, and well-written. You are a captive of—maybe a serial killer? Except you’re not really a captive, despite being bound. You want to be there. You’re rapturous about the torture, the dismemberment, the truly awful things that happen to you. This has an impressive amount of choice and feels like a real game, which not many Petite Morts manage to do. I normally don’t like timed text that shows up slowly on the screen, but here it feels right, especially the weird and creepy repetition of “yes, yes”. I got both endings here, and they’re both just horrible, and I mean that in the best possible way.
origin of love, by sophiades
Summary
This is interactive poetry, which is right up my alley. Even more so because it’s really sexy, and it involves a vampire. The writing is sometimes over-the-top, which really works in this context. There isn’t really any choice here—just clicking on words to get more poetry and to continue to the next page. And that’s a thing about writing a game in a short amount of time—unless you’re a magic wizard coder, you’re probably going to have to sacrifice something, and in this case the author prioritized writing over gamifying, which is an excellent choice for an interactive poem. Creepy, with some truly lovely writing and a lot of heat.
Buggy, by Mathbrush
Summary
I expect nothing less than great work from Brian, and great is what you get with this game. It’s a tremendously weird little parser game that plays on parser conventions and default Inform messages with creepy glee. Do something violent in it. Play with your inventory. Do all the things that never get good responses in parser games. It’s a really clever game that I don’t want to say anything else about. Go play it (Note: if you’re not a parser player, you might not get the jokes. That’s OK.).
Trick or Treat or Trick or Treat or Trick, by Stewart C. Baker
Summary
I’m pretty sure this is Ryan Veeder’s pen name, and I love Ryan’s games, so this had me grinning before I started. I had a little bit of a rough time getting going (there’s only one command that will work, and don’t precede it with “say” or anything like that). You’re a kid, you’re trick-or-treating, there’s a weird old guy and a weird time-loop device… it’s a good setup with a fun—and frustrating—puzzle. This is a parser game, and Inform 7 is hard to do in a short amount of time, so as is usual with Petite Mort parser games there’s a lot of underimplementation here. There are some strange solutions—try everything. There aren’t many items in the game, so it’s not too difficult to try things, but you’re on a timer, so keep a map so you don’t waste turns.
