As I’m not entering the comp this year I thought I’d take the oppertunity to write some reviews, as it was so encouraging as an author last year to read everyone’s thoughts! Not entirely sure how many games I’ll get through—I’m getting married in three weeks! But, I’m going to give it a shot. 
02/09/26 - Archive 13 and When You Were Shot By Elephants
04/09/26 - On Repeat and Residual Income
06/09/26 - Ethelred Estate, Ass in the Woods and Quackpond
“Don’t look when it should be empty…”
Detective • Half an hour • Choice-based • Twine
This was the first game in my random shuffle that caught my eye. The blurb brought to mind the rules-based horror popularised on reddit’s noSleep, which I’m a fan of.
I was surprised when I opened Archive 13 to find Cyrillic text. I played via Google’s in-browser machine translation.
It was a rocky start, with the prose switching tenses and points of view between past and present, and second and third person, but I’m not sure whether I can credit this to Anastasiia’s writing or shoddy robot translation.
I read on despite this and was just getting into the mystery, into foggy memories and contradictory evidence, wondering if I was stepping into a curse or a cover up when—I was presented with a black screen and no option to progress.
Thankfully, this was made with Harlowe, so I was able to step back and choose another option. This did get me to an ending; however, I can’t say I entirely understood the thought process behind the branching nor why that choice allowed me to progress.
According to the blurb it is one of three endings, so I pressed the option to try again in order to find another conclusion to this mystery, as there is something compelling there, but unfortunately this took me to another blank screen with no progression, and that was enough for me to end my time inside Archive 13.
“The player is out there somewhere.”
Romance • Parser-based • Glulx
Generally, when engaging with parody, pastiche or media that subverts the rules of its genre, it’s helpful to have a broad knowledge of the works the piece is in conversation with.
While I may have had a childhood of forgetting my towel and getting lost in the tunnels under G.U.E, I’ve not kept up with the parser scene, and I don’t believe I have enough knowledge to understand what WYWSBE is trying to do.
The home page greets us with “a tribute to the classic trilogy by no m3rcy” but my meagre Google-fu produced nothing on this. Whether it’s a joke, an in-joke, or a hard to find game, I’m not sure.
The whole project does appear to be a joke, with an inappropriate genre tag, nonsensical content warnings and a walkthrough that reads “test me”. Both of these are, in my opinion, unkind to the player. As a reader and writer of horror, I’m a big fan of content warnings allowing the writer to be their most raw self and allowing the reader to step back if it’s not their jam, so I don’t love it when these are made fun of.
The game itself is fun, and produced laughs even if there were layers that went over my head. It took me a minute to figure out that I was, in fact, playing as the elephant, not playing as the player but being told what the elephant was doing, but I think this delirious point of view can be chalked down to my inexperience with the form.
Eventually, I twigged how to perform the stated goal, but was then thwarted by a points system who’s total kept growing. I believe that’s part of both the joke and the puzzle, but by this point my frustration tolerance was pretty low and I decided to exit.
I’m really looking forward to reading what more experienced parser players have to say about this one, and finding out how much has gone over my head vs how much is just a very confusing joke game.
As the blurb tells me, because I have reviewed this game, I will now be shot by elephants.
EDIT – I’ve now played the shot by elephants trilogy thanks to @cendare and @EJoyce’s help. They provide context as to what WYWSBE is riffing on and explain the growing point total, but I get the impression this is a “had to be there” kind of joke.
EDIT 2 – Thanks @lpsmith and @alyshkalia for the tips! After running “test me” I’ve now seen a little more of the game, but I don’t it makes much of a difference to my review.
The “no m3rcy” reference appears to be this author: NOM3RCY - Member Profile . I have not played their games, though.
Yeah, it was a trilogy of troll games that became a community in-joke for a hot second back in the early 2010s. They’re very, very short if anyone feels like trying to get some background on this year’s entry.
Thank you both! I’ll give those a try and possibly update my review once I’ve got a little more understanding of the history here
Also, I haven’t fired up this game, but if the debugging verbs were left on, ‘test me’ may well just work and show you the whole game (if you enter it as the first move, that is). It’s still a pretty trollish thing to do (since it won’t help you get unstuck, just show you the whole thing at once), but it may not be the level of trollishness you thought it was.
I tried it and “test me” does indeed run through one path of the game; it’s not the path most players are likely to take, though, so it’s more of a display of extra content the author has included than a demonstration of how to achieve the “winning” ending.
“Love at first spin.”
Slice of life • 15 minutes or less • Choice-based • Twine
This game has really lovely presentation, with a three-stage emoji UI to display the player character’s emotion. The core of the game is about managing this state, and we learn as we go that we are less in control of it than we would like to be.
I tried a couple of different combinations but only seemed to get one ending. I suppose the ending needed to be the same in order to make the author’s point, but I would have liked to have seen a little more branching.
That being said, I really enjoyed the amount of reactivity to the player’s emotional state that was baked into each scene. A particular highlight was an interaction with a barista, where in a good mood, my player character imagined they fancied me, but the next time I clicked this option, in a low mood, the player character mentioned having imagined this. The game seemed to know that my mood had changed and that I had seen this screen before, which I appreciated.
“Corpses don’t have bank accounts.”
Crime • 15 minutes or less • Choice-based • Twine
This is my favourite game of the comp so far. The prose is stylish and snappy in a way that supports the criminal premise and gives the reader a strong sense of who the player character is.
I enjoyed the unique take on vampires here—familiar enough that we understand what we’re dealing with, but with eating hours of potential as a pleasantly surprising twist.
I also enjoyed the flip of the vampire-as-aristocrat trope with “corpses don’t have bank accounts” and the portrait of the vampire as a thief and scavenger, killing out of necessity rather than extravagance.
As far as I can tell there are at least 3 endings! But I can see why that might not be obvious, since I think you’re right about most combinations leading to the same outcome… it seems to be all about the emoji you finish with, which itself is tied to how much you listen to the album vs. do other activities.
This is purely my own interpretation, but looking at the different paths and outcomes, I felt like there was a point being made about not getting stuck doing the same things over and over (whether it’s getting lost in endless routine or excessively chasing novelty/escapism), and instead making time both for regular life work and for engaging with passions that inspire and energize us!
I presumed the author was making a point about being stuck and becoming unable to be unstuck, and therefore presumed that there was no other ending to be found–sound like there’s more to it than that! Thanks for letting me know about the other endings, I might have to give this one another try before I submit my votes.
“She gave me a terrible burden.”
The style of interaction here involves dragging words from a selection at the bottom of the screen on top of words inside the text. This is a really unique and interesting way of making choices. It’s well tutorialised in the opening menu and the slow reveal of additional text make the additions easy to follow.
The story is dreamy and gothic with a suitably gloomy sense of atmosphere.
One path during the “listen closely” segment led me to a dead end, but I’d enjoyed what I’d played enough to give the whole game another try. I did find an ending on my second try and felt my second play through was quite distinct from the first.
“All for one prank, one prank for all.”
Ass in the Woods would have been an okay experience if it was not for that one cardinal sin: timed text. I looked down to write a note, and looked up to find the page had moved on entirely.
The story is a take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, focusing on Bottom. I’ve seen the play a couple of times and never wanted to know more about Bottom’s character, however I can tell this is something the author is passionate about. The smaller sections with Titania and Oberon interested me more—essentially telling Oberon to fuck off was pretty fun.
Beyond removing the timed text, I would have liked to see a different approach to dialogue. I understand each speaker has their own colour; however, I still found it a little difficult to parse who was speaking and would have preferred dialogue tags.
The prose here is middling. That would be fine—plenty of games thrive on their structure, story and gameplay over shiny prose—but when the inevitable comparison with the source material is made, it just doesn’t hold up.
“Got any grapes?”
Residual Income has some competition for my favourite game of the comp! I didn’t expect to be particularly interested in this game based on the blurb, but upon seeing the game’s first page I was flooded with nostalgia. My first note for this game is just “omg neopets”.
The presentation here is great, a real harp back to to the hand-coded html sites of the early naughties. Making my duck was very fun.
I really like the mode of interaction here, where two choices are presented, and after the player picks one they’re presented with a textbox where they can type in their own response to the messageboard drama. The actual branching is kept simple, while infinite options for player expression are available.
I wanted to meet this game where it was, so really tried to get into the rp of it all, manufacturing drama with lies. In fact, I got so into it that I forgot to feed my duck, but managed to salvage Ducky before he got sad.
