The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate
“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.
Ass in the Woods
“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.
Quackpond
“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.
The messageboard text feels realistic to how people type (or did, during this time period!). Overall, great piece.