Oh, this is a great review! I had a similar response to Eight Last Signs, but I roll waaaay less deep on the tradition it’s working in, so it’s very rewarding to read someone who actually knows what they’re talking about engage with its poetics and dynamics. I didn’t pick up on as much of the connective tissue between the per-monument choices and the “hybrid” poems, so I especially appreciate you bringing those to light.
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Thanks very much! Yeah, sometimes games hit you just right. I love surrealism, Oulipo, and prose poetry, so the game checks many boxes for me.
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Violent Delight by Coral Nulla
This one instantly drew me in. Retro aesthetic + metagame + unusual dev system (Decker) + mechanic that antagonizes the player? Yes, please.
Violent Delight is a spin on the “haunted VHS” subgenre of games one can find on itch.io. Here, we are buying an old video game cartridge (The Playground) that might have some hidden horror on it, in the spirit of rumors that were once passed around schoolyards. When we look at the game’s listing on our ersatz eBay, we’re told it comes “W/ AGESWITCH”—and eventually sliding the age switch e’er to the right reveals more and more creepiness in The Playground.
But first! We’ve won the auction to buy the game! Our payment is processed, and now we wait an hour for the game to arrive. As in, a real-life hour. There’s a little progress bar in the lower-right part of the screen that slowly empites. While we can wait, we can fiddle with a few things. We can make tea, or we can check out some listings for some parody games of a parody IFComp. I particularly enjoyed these—the satire is smart in its descriptions, and attempting to play any of the games results in sly commentary about the UK’s Online Safety Act.
Finally we can play the game. It starts innocently enough, with the first level being a park. We can wander around and click on crude but charming graphics to get text boxes to pop up, sort of like a mini point-and-click adventure. The writing is childlike, featuring a boy and his duckie, apparently appealing to three-year-olds according to the age switch. Our game console shorts out after a while (there’s a timer) and then we have to wait a while for it to reset (another timer). Then we plug the cartridge back in and wait for it to boot up (another timer). As we increase the age rating, we wander into stranger and stranger territory. We don’t get the same game, but what instead seems to be later versions of some of the characters. We move from the park to a mall to a prison to Hell, and even further down to a laboratory, hospital, office, and more. There are nine total levels, and it’s difficult to not think of the Inferno as we seem to travel into increasingly dangerous territory as we descend.
The plot seems to be about aging and how life will crush you as you get older. Rupert reappears, initially being chastised for poor grammar, then being evaluated at a testing center and failing, then winding up in the hospital, and so forth. A character who has a ball in the park level winds up towards the very end of the journey literally crushed by a mountain of mistakes.
But the narrative is more lyrical than anything. The horror isn’t scary in the traditional blood-and-gore-and-jumpscare sense; it’s the more quotidian failings of life we must all go through and to which all of us must succumb. There are plenty of witty interactions, and I wished I had time to read them all as I descended.
Because as you proceed downward, our console is less tolerant of the game, causing it to fail that much faster. The game offers an option to save any text you encounter, but towards the bottom the timer moves so quickly that’s it impossible to read everything in one go. And that, to me, is a misstep. The references and snatches of dialogue often talk past each other in a pleasant lyrical way, but it’s easy to forget who has said what, and the game’s “print” command saves the text but no other information about from whom or which level it came. I’d like to spend more time reading the writing in context.
All the while, our narrator shares their own thoughts and memories which are often only semi-related to the game—confusion about the game’s content, but also reveries about weird old men and never getting married. And there’s a real snowstorm outside which sounds like it will be locking us in for at least the night. In the game, the ninth level is a bedroom with a computer and a player. In Dante, the ninth circle is for traitors and it is fundamentally frozen.
It’s not clear whom we’ve betrayed other than ourselves. The ending is odd. We travel into our real-life basement and find, apparently, a real-life boy down there. It’s hard to not think of Rupert or one of the other children from the park level of The Playground. He offers us a shovel and tells us to dig. The game concludes with a vacant screen save for one final progress bar that doesn’t seem to move.
What to make of all this? There is also a subgenre of games on sites like itch.io that mistake lyricism for depth. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case here—the writing is too enjoyable, and there’s enough narrative thread—but the writing and mechanics of the game often seem to be at odds. Why all the timers? The game’s subtitle is “an experiment in withholding,” which certainly applies, but even when all the story’s text is made available (such as opening the HTML file in an editor—the plaintext is all there), it still isn’t always sensical. But it’s entertaining and has meaning, and I wish the game would allow for that exploration. Instead, I found myself kind of rushing through everything, digging ever deeper, that the story seemed beside the point. Is that, then, the point of the story? It’s quite hard to say, but I’d be dissatisfied is that’s what’s intended.
As for the ending, some notes on hacking the game: the key variable to change is TIMELIMIT. I didn’t look at the code super-carefully, but I found changing most values to 10 cut down the wait times effectively. The concluding lone timer does seem to be set to a value—259222, which, divided by 3600 seconds in an hour, yields about 72 hours—but I let the unhacked game run for 12 hours and didn’t notice an appreciable difference. There’s another number (1756311195) which seems to affect the calculation. Hacking this particular timer causes it to decrease like normal, but nothing appears to happen once it completes. Interestingly, there does seem to be a narrative end—it’s line 7728 in VS Code if you want to read it (or just search the source for “{card:rescue}”).
There’s even more to be said about the “violent” nature of the game and the particular delights it offers. Kinetic Mouse Car’s review has an excellent breakdown of many of the narrative beats. And I really like Victor Gijsbers’s review as well. I’m not convinced, though, that the game’s waiting mechanic is trolling as much as one that doesn’t work that well. It’s a lot of work to try to make sense of what’s happening in the story; there’s no need to make it infuriatingly harder. And again, I think “but that’s the point!” is too easy of a dodge.
I really like Violent Delight in many ways. The writing never takes itself too seriously. It has some sharp satire and abundant pleasing surreal moments. Each level of the descent is a surprise. But the timers and the narrator’s thoughts and the game with its hidden levels and all the characters within the game and the boy at the end and the fact that there’s apparently a real ending one can reach (or at least that exists in the source code) don’t quite coalesce into a greater whole. It’s an experiment that largely works, but in the end I found myself wanting to no longer suffer the game’s design.
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I find it a little hard to believe that someone would think that waiting an hour is a fun mechanic… but, on the other hand, it does capture that retro feel of having to load a game from a tape deck, so maybe I’m wrong!
It looks like you were more successful than I was in getting the game to speed up. How did you get access to the source code?
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Yeah, it was absolutely not a fun mechanic. I think it depends on how one defines trolling. I guess I’d define it as either delibirately mean-spirited (only designed to yield unpleasant reactions from people) or deliberately dumb / funny / off-topic. Here, the mechanic is at least mimetic in theory, even though it violates the fundamental fiction principle of skipping over all the boring stuff. So it definitely antagonizes, but there might be a more genuine purpose to it? Maybe? (I do wonder how many people will just quit once they realize the game is earnest about the one hour.)
I downloaded the HTML file and then opened it up in Visual Studio Code. I don’t know anything about Decker (though this game makes me want to learn more!) but I was surprised to see that it looks like it’s just Decker’s raw code in there, as opposed to some Base64-compressed thing, and it’s reasonably readable.
The story seems to be arranged more or less chronologically in the code, which makes me think the {rescue} card is the true end since it’s pretty much the last of the story code before what I think is the Decker engine code.
(And maybe the time I’ve spent looking at all of this is in fact my falling victim to trolling, after all. 
)
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Hey B.J.! Thank you so so much for trying out the game and for your genuine feedback!
You’re entirely correct - in my mind it’s meant to be the game I wish I would have had when I was younger (definitely Young Adult territory).
One of the main challenges of the game’s premise is finding the RIGHT people at the RIGHT time (instead of 30 years too late - sorry for that). I was worried something like this would happen, but I still hope its worth it to have this project out there - for those who DO need it, even if it sometimes misses the mark.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve it I’m all ears! I also plan to do a proper release after the competition, and hopefully the right keywords will help it surface to people its more relevant to.
Thanks again for approaching it earnestly! It means the world to me!
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Space Mission: 2045 by Benjamin Knob
I hate to kick a game when it’s down, but frankly, a Comp game should work, more or less, out of the box. This one does not. Instead, it yields, “Error during AI interpretation: 401 Client Error: Unauthorized for url” once the player enters a command after the intro screens.
The space-themed setup is fine enough. But using AI to give NPC responses–purportedly the reason for including AI here–seems unnecessary to begin with, and especially so when it prevents any command at all. Even standard parser commands trigger the AI, which again produces the error.
This issue has been known for a while and remains unfixed. The game’s premise might have some merit, but as of now, there’s literally nothing to play here.
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heh…
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