Amanda's Short Reviews of Petite Morts

Ah! I tend not to replay much. I’ll go through a Petite Mort about twice since they’re short, but generally replay is not my bag. I do want to see how this ends, though, so I’ll go back. I’ll correct my review.

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Thanks so much for reading Blackout Amanda! :slight_smile: I’m so glad you enjoyed it.

As for the double-click, it’s something I’m experimenting with to increase the friction of Twine a bit. At least for myself, progression can almost feel so effortless that I start to skim while reading the text, especially for text-heavy games. I wanted to see if implementing a double-click would slow down the pace, if only for a couple milliseconds. I’m trying it out in a more ambitious project as well and interested to see if it continues to be annoying.

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I thought a lot about how I’d spend my 7 days after playing your game, and decided that this would be an excellent time to try opium. Go ahead and assimilate me then-- you’ll just get a drooling idiot of no use to your collective.

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:joy: :joy: I’ve been thinking of adding a couple more branches once voting is over, and opium stupor definitely seems like a viable option

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There Those Dare Doze, by Andrew Schultz

Summary

Andrew reliably does zippy word games which are always fun. I would like to point out that candy corn is gross, and the PC is indeed the only person that eats it, to my knowledge, unless someone wants to come clean about their candy corn habit here so we can have an intervention. I normally love word games, and I’m great with anagrams and pig latin, but for some reason I am simply terrible at rhymes. I find myself lawnmowering through the alphabet, doodling words and forgetting what I’m supposed to be doing. So with apologies to Andrew, I went through this with the walkthrough. As usual in his games, there are silly characters and outlandish situations and the whole affair is fun. But my brain just does not throw out rhymes fluently, and I’m old enough that I can confidently say that I probably won’t get better at it. If your brain DOES work this way, you will simply adore this game, and his larger ones in the same vein.

Zombie Eye, by Dee Cooke

Summary

I tested this game. It’s got great, gross art, and some extremely disturbing images. If you have needle phobia (that’s Trypanophobia for those of you who have never been phlebotomists), you will really, really not like this game. For the rest of us who delight in scary syringes, you’ll love this. It’s truly squirm-inducing, and has a great surprise ending. You may struggle to find the right verb a little, but luckily Dee is on that and has a VERBS command that will help you out.

The Enigma of the Old Manor House, by Dercomai

Summary

I tested this game. Way back in my first bunch of reviews, I talked about how unless you are a magic wizard coder, you have to sacrifice something in a Petite Mort game. Well, Daniel is a magic wizard coder and hasn’t sacrificed anything. This is a parser game that is a proper game with difficult puzzles, many locations, and great implementation. You will not finish this in 10 minutes. You may not finish it in an hour. And yet it is a Petite Mort.

You’re ghost-hunting in a spooky old house, and you have all the traditional parser things: locked doors, blocked doors, things that are too high up, and a set of goals that ae helpfully listed for you. I’m more than impressed at what he was able to do here, and it’s a clear contender for winning the Petite Mort category.

HSL Type Ω MEWP Certification Exam by stringwizard

I couldn’t figure out how to play this. I downloaded the file, looked at all the subfiles in confusion, and moved on. If anyone has advice for the technologically challenged here, I’d love to hear it.

And a word on my game, ZIT

Summary

My husband is annoyed at me for using his name for the jerky ex-husband here, but in my defense I was racing a clock, grabbed a familiar name out of my brain, and then ran out of time before I could change it. So to clear his good name: Tom has not so far left me for a 28-year-old. Tom also pointed out that people might worry about me if they thought the PC was me, so here’s what I have in common with Natalie: we’re of a similar age, we both have tiny hall half-bathrooms, we both have a best friend named Eva (I noticed no objections from Eva to my using her name, since in the game she has a hot young boyfriend), we’re both technophobes, and we both had a giant zit at an untimely and unfair age.

I had this mammoth zit earlier this month, hid for nearly a week until it was vanquished, and felt sorry for myself until I realized that I might have had to impress people while sporting the zit, and that would have been horrifying, and that I’m lucky enough to be able to hide when such things happen. And then I played Nose Bleed in IFComp and that inspired me to write ZIT, using the zit as a metaphor for the disasters that can stike the middle-aged (although let’s be honest: if you’re 50, you’re not middle-aged anymore unless you think you’ll live to be 100, which with my wine-heavy lifestyle is unlikely).

Anyway, I hope you like it. Well, you won’t like it because it’s an unlikeable game. I hope you play it, at any rate.

And that’s all the Petite Mort games, I think. Well done, everybody!

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There are three endings, but the balance of how likely you are to get each one is probably kind of wonky because it’s a Petite Mort game and no one playtested it but me. It would have been less wonky if I had just made each option give you one point towards the relevant ending, but I wanted to weight the choices to allow for an escalation from pretending everything is fine to being moderately honest to being completely honest. That’s a progression that makes a lot of sense from a characterization standpoint, and I felt like it would be odd for that to be exactly as likely to get you a bad ending as doing the same thing in reverse. But of course, weighting the choices made it more complicated to keep track of the likelihood of reaching each ending (especially because I’m bad at math and was just kind of trial-and-erroring my way through making sure that the aforementioned escalation was possible).

You’re right about my priorities vis-a-vis the polish of the writing vs. the length of the game – I did kind of wish I had room for a slower buildup, but, you know, four hours, and in the end I thought quality was probably more important than quantity.

Anyway, thank you for the review, and I’m glad you enjoyed the game!

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Oh, dang. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy with my new job and haven’t checked back on my own game page (I have been chowing down some other Petite Morts and will probably also post some reviews soon), so I didn’t realize that the HSL Type Omega MEWP Certification Exam wasn’t takeable online. The exam portion is implemented in ChoiceScript. There’s probably an easy way to make it readable in-browser on itch.io that someone savvier than myself with either platforms could point me toward, if so that would be great. I’d wager it’s probably something staggeringly simple.

Otherwise the supplemental manual portion should still be accessible, as it’s just a .txt file last I checked. Although I get too that if you’re reviewing the entries, you might want to review just the exam portion, cool. The manual is there more for people who either want to study for the exam seriously (not needed), look up answers during the exam (also not strictly necessary), or as an option for anyone who might want to sink their teeth into it a little more (there’s plenty of material/spooky bits/jokes in the manual that have no related question or reference in the exam portion).

If you did want to take the exam in your browser from the downloaded .zip file, you can drag and drop the index.html file from the main folder into your browser and then when prompted, upload the folder. Apologies again about that.

I should also get it to post my name instead of my handle in the by-line.

Update: Well, I was able to change the display name (it’s under account settings, not the game page) and compiled the game into a single .html file (by running the helpfully named “compile.html”), but I still haven’t been able to make it playable in-browser from itch.io. I’ll keep trying, but hopefully these changes help for now.

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You can make a ChoiceScript game playable in itch by uploading it after compiling and checking the “This file will be played in the browser” box. You probably also want to configure the embed options. These are the settings I used for my entry:

Also @AmandaB I’m impressed by how much you get done, The Spectators is pretty impressive!

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Aw, shucks-- thanks. That’s what can happen when you ignore all your real responsibilities and spend all your time writing free games instead of making money.

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Thanks for your review Amanda (and for testing!).

And well done for getting through all the Petite Mort games so quickly - great reviews!

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Thanks for this help! It looks like I didn’t have my game option set to HTML, so I wasn’t seeing that option. I switched it over and there it was. I appreciate your help.

So yeah, my game should now be playable in-browser. Woo hoo!

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HSL Type Ω MEWP Certification Exam by stringwizard

And the very last of my Petite Mort reviews, now that I can play this game!

I’m glad to end on this one, because it’s great on a lot of levels. First, it’s really funny. Second, it’s a genius design for a Petite Mort, because the bulk of its text is in a feelie (a user manual), and feelies are not included in the 4 hour time limit. I am feeling really, really jealous of this idea. Green, really.

Anyway, the manual is long and you will think, “I’m not going to read all this.” And then you’ll read all of it because you’ll be laughing. The last brilliant thing about this is that the game itself is a quiz over the material, which is an easy format, so the author had all 4 hours to make a lengthy quiz with extremely funny choices, which are typo-free, well-written, and look as if the author was just rolling around luxuriously in extra time to make things perfect. There’s that jealousy again. Anyway, I’m rating this 5 stars, not just for how good it is, but for how smart it is.

Fin

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Hey Amanda, thanks for playing my entry!

Speed of text has been something I’ve received lots of comments on, so I’ll definitely be speeding it up after the voting period finishes!

Much appreciated.

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Aw shucks! Your review is too kind, you’re making me blush. Thank you so much, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

I assure you though that “luxuriating” is about as far from describing my temperament on the day I submitted the work. Between getting everything typed up, still having to pick up new equipment for the job, and other stuff I was an anxious wreck. But I was glad to be able to do the most useful thing I could with my anxieties: make a little art. There are definitely some typos in there (one on page 34 of the manual, technically question 9 in the exam has an error where I forgot to say “haunted” in front of “scissor lift” [because that would just be a boring, ol’ group A type 3 MEWP and we want the omegas]… I’m sure I would find others if I re-re-re-re-re-read it again), but it’s ECTOCOMP and part of the whole deal is to counter the tendency (a major one for me) of self-censoring or perfectionism or thinking it’s not good enough in some way yet or any of that so for now I’ve decided to just let it be.

But wow yes, thanks again for your review, very much appreciated. You made my day!

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The trick is to punch the undead gorilla repeatedly; one punch isn’t enough. That unlocks the next part of the plot. Eventually you can find the bad fairy’s secret hideout.

Quotes (spoilery!)

Just as Reg was about to enter his home, a small fairy crashed into him. She looked scared.
She looked at Reg and squeaked “Sorry, mister, but I was trying to get away from the bad fairy. She is trying to kidnap all
the good fairies and make them clean her house and her house is always dirty!”

[…]

Reg exclaims “You’re going into space, bad fairy!” and hits for 5 points of damage.

bad fairy looks stunned as they go flying into space. You gain 1000 experience.

Sparkle finds a spare key and unlocks all the cages, setting the fairies free! All the fairies cheer and clap for You and your
family.
You and your family get back into your family SUV and drive home. You all sit down and eat dinner and watch TV. Then,
you all went to bed

*** The End ***

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