I’m doing it :3 I’m reviewing the games :3 See the main review-a-thon info post for more deets!
Prioritizing games with fewer reviews currently, I’m gonna start with the 0 review games and work my way along, unless someone happens to sponsor me at the $5 tier with a request ;3
by @Kastel
When I played this game, I expected a single choice (given what Jam it was for), not no choice, so when I finished, I was pretty surprised. I replayed it a few times to see if there was literally anything else I could do, and read a few reviews to see if I was missing anything. I don’t think I am…? The closest thing I can think of is that you can kind of hop between listening and looking during the leg moment, which seems to delay the leg moment progression, but nothing changes because of this and I wasn’t 100% sure it wasn’t an Inform implementation bug.
Past my initial confusion-- I think that this game is very good at depicting the moment and feeling it’s trying to convey, a profoundly uncomfortable family dinner trapped within the bonds of social/familial norms and the echoes of past abuse, both gender and sexuality based in the text, and possibly more. The lack of agency throughout the whole game is a simple and perfect execution of ludonarrative harmony, where our own lack of agency as players reflects the lack of agency of the protagonist. I also found it poignant and sad that this feeling of having no right to voice their problems extended past their family dinner to their attempt at a social media escape, which only seemed to hurry on the death of their willpower.
I just played Repeat the Ending today as well, and in the metatext, the author comments that while his game may seem like a miseryfest, sometimes life is just abject shit for people. This seems to reflect that sort of approach. This isn’t a fun game, it isn’t particularly fulfilling, but it’s not trying to be fun or fulfilling, it’s trying to depict a very specific experience, and it does quite a bit thematically with very few words.
However, I have to admit that I am not rating it very highly, though for an extremely subjective reason.
I am Chinese, however I am specifically a Chinese-American adoptee. I really don’t relate to most stories, anecdotes, memes, or anything that other Chinese people tend to use as cultural touchpoints (whether those living in China or those in the diaspora). Nothing currently makes me feel more alienated from my ethnicity than Chinese (and honestly, East Asian diaspora people in general) people talking about “subtle asian traits” or the relatability of having Tiger Moms or whatever.
While I fully acknowledge that this game is not trying to claim that Every Chinese Person Has Had This Experience, and in fact the protagonist appears to be incredibly specific (being, presumably, a trans person who was AMAB, along with other particular details), and I also fully acknowledge that this is an “i am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?” take of mine, I can’t help but feel a little cold about this game labeling the experience as a Chinese™️ Family™️ Dinner™️ Moment™️. I didn’t have a Chinese Family™️, I’ve never had a Chinese Family Dinner™️, and I’ve certainly never had a Chinese Family Dinner Moment™️ , so this game is definitively Not About Me, and it’s not trying to be about me, but the labelling sure does remind me that I am not Chinese™️. (I also know that this was not Kastel’s intention. It’s just a subjective feeling of mine.)
An extra dimension of it is that I did not know my birth parents, and I get a little horrified at the idea that this is what I was ““missing out on””. It seems a little flattening, because I think, surely not all Chinese Family’s Dinners are like this? But then I remember that I do not actually, and will never actually know, so it gets me feeling weird.
I will lastly note there are a few verbs that get Inform standard responses, like “jump”, “hit (or any violence term)” “eat”, and “touch” which kind of ruin the agency-robbing effect to a degree, when everything else points you toward one thing.
I actually just played this one today - will be a bit before I get to my review, but I thought it’s worth flagging that there is a choice (though I had to read the source code to find it): you can QUIT whenever you want.
Next one’s Revenant’s Lament, but I need a bit to chew on it. 3 IF games in one day might have been too much. Keep a lookout though!
Funny, my randomized list also gave me Revenant’s Lament right after Chinese Family Dinner Moment and I also just played that one today too!
A perfectly reasonable response. I’m surprised people didn’t bring this up earlier; it was something I considered too when publishing the game to the public because I can see it as possibly “representative” of all Chinese experiences. Not even non-diaspora Chinese people experience this!
There were options like “Southeast Asian Chinese Moment”, but I found them clunky and still susceptible to the issue raised. I ended up convincing myself this was the title to land at because, for better or for worse, the version of myself that produced this game was in a kind of predicament about their Chinese ethnicity. I am very aware that I wouldn’t have made this game if I wasn’t in such a mood like this. There’s no way I would make a title like this now.
Thanks for playing the game. Really interesting review!
by @30x30
The first thing that catches me about this game is the language, which is lush and darkly detailed. The setting being painted is extremely evocative, a sort of Wild West that (the literal Devil and immortal cowboy aside) I’m not 100% sure ever truly existed anywhere outside of people’s imaginations, but is that so bad? It’s peak southern gothic and it luxuriates in that trope.
The thing I found most interesting about the text is how it echoes the futile fight against fate that Andromeda Chained (my game), Chinese Family Dinner Moment, and How Dare You do as well (along with, to my understanding, several other games in this -thon, such as the Bluebeard adaptations) (I wonder why this is? Just a coincidence?)
You can say “No, I don’t want to listen to your tale” to the stranger (presumably the Devil) and they’ll just strongarm you into listening anyway, John has to say “I want to live forever” to the Devil, he has to go to the Saloon, he has to die. These railroads are shown through various agency-robbing techniques such as choice changes upon clicking (which I thought were a nice touch), unclickable choices, and an unrelenting “Continue” as the only option. I played through the 4 endings and no matter which ending you pick, John will become a revenant. It felt like the very title and framing of the game doomed him to this fate, and I liked that aspect of it a lot, given the inevitability of the Devil, and the Devil forcing you to listen to the tale in the first place.
I thought it was very interesting that Cassidy’s body is never actually described once Temperance finds her, other than that it looks horrible and mauled. Temperance clearly reacts to something unexpected in the gendered body traits department, with a comment about “do other men know”, which made me wonder if the body was testosterone-based but missing a Certain Part. In the end it was so vague that the confession that Temperance was like her was mostly opaque.
But that isn’t actually a critique! As a queer person myself who doesn’t really fit into any specific binaries in terms of body or gender, and doesn’t really feel the need to be clear or defined in a specific way, it felt true–especially in a fantasty-historical setting where people clearly don’t have the language we have today in the modern world. And with the genderblending of John being born a girl, raised a son, falsely taking his father’s name and pronouns, then switching back to Cassidy and she/her pronouns, then switching back to John and he/him once on his mission, saying he’s “a trans man” or “a nonbinary person” or whatever else feels flattening. Personally I really liked it.
Other small note, I liked how the identities of “you” and “I” in the endings change each time.
Sometimes I did wish that there were more page breaks, especially in what I will call the “interlude” section after John dies, as my eyes started to glaze over a bit with how insistently detailed the descriptions were. However, I really liked the vague and tranquil calm that floated through this section, and the floating from consciousness to consciousness intensifying until you are now a mountain lion mauling a guy. I knew something was gonna happen, I suspected quietly what it was, yet it went long enough that I started to give up on that idea, until it came true with John waking up. It was a very “they had me in the first half, not gonna lie” kind of feeling. What good pacing!
With pacing as good as that, the timed text felt entirely unnecessary. I am not sure the ability to click past the text to go forward was a bug, and if it wasn’t a bug, if it was a good idea. Like Mathbrush mentions in his review on IFDB, I actually clicked past two of the ending stingers by accident, and had to reload, which was more unfortunate the first time because I hadn’t had any saves at all so had to play from the very beginning, speedrunning through the text in a way that ran counter to the langorously slow text. I think, especially in the interlude section and its end, and the John on a Devil’s Mission section, trusting the writing itself to deliver the correct impact was far more effective.
As well, the main flaw I noticed in the otherwise beautiful writing (aside from a few typos) is that it pretty consistently switches from present tense to past tense and back, within the span of a few paragraphs, multiple times. I think it mostly wants to be in present, but I’m not sure.
Thank you so much for your review!!!
I especially appreciated your takes on queerness/gender with The Revenant’s Lament as someone who also doesn’t fit neatly into binary perceptions of gender. I would like to say that while John will never have the words for it, a lot of the way he feels about his body are meant to resemble both trans-masculinity and butchness, and that Temperance recognizes both of those things as a function of being a lesbian herself, and the feminine counterpart to the person she deems and names Cassidy.
To clarify about the timed text – a lot of The Revenant’s Lament is bugged, especially the timed text. I’ve been working on a re-release to fix these bugs, remove/create a toggle for the timed text, and also clean up the spelling/grammar – most of the game was written in one night, and I’ve been collecting valuable feedback for months now on how best to give the story its proper due. Thank you again for your review!