I’m excited to participate in the review a thon. There are many poke bowl spots where I live, and I intend to sample as many as possible between now and August 30 (kidding, sorry for the dad joke). Thank you for setting this up, @alyshkalia! I really appreciate all of the reviews of my games, and I haven’t been good at returning the favor, so I’m glad to have this added structure and motivation.
16 Likes
Teatime with a Vampire by manomanora
Vampire stories–and interpretations of vampire stories–have often been vehicles for addressing serious issues such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. If Teatime with a Vampire has an underlying theme it might be something like “pop culture under late capitalism”? And in this, it is witty, incisive, and totally entertaining. For example, “‘They’re just like us!’ touted magazines around the world for years, featuring the nightly walkers in every of their issues, tracing family lines and connecting individuals, reporting on the horrors and the wonders. And between the awe and hatred for those mystical beings, it turned out this catchline was not completely wrong…aside from the whole blood sucking thing and living only in the dark, that is.” Ultimately, the integration of vampires into human society has turned out to be mostly a source of entertainment, a business opportunity, and a welcome solution to a third-shift labor shortage.
My favorite part of the game is the vampire Mr. Orlok, who is the host of the titular TV talk show. Whereas the Orlok of the Murnau movie is stilted and awkward (like everyone in silent films, to be fair), Mr. Orlok is handsome (“honey blond short hair, parted and twisted into finger waves, unwavering thanks to a surely ungodly amount of hairspray”), magnetic and flirtatious, and has the audience–and the mopey PC Alex–eating out of his hand. There were some spelling errors and agreement errors which, if fixed, would give the game a more polished feel, but I didn’t really care because I felt swept up by the rhythm of the show, and dazzled by the lights. For a game that takes as its premise the guilty pleasure of a gossipy talk show (a format that the author really nails, btw, with segments like “Eat or Dish” where the guest has to answer a personal question or eat gross food), this game has a lot of depth and humor, and a pretty outstanding NPC in Mr. Orlok, who I will definitely be nominating for best NPC in the next round of IFDB awards.
10 Likes
AAaaaaaw thanks for being my first reviewer for TwaV!! 
Such a lovely review
I’m glad you enjoyed this silly train-wreck 
If you had noted any specific issues and errors by any chance, please shoot me a dm so I can fix it again 
Mr Orlok was so fun to write. I think he’s one of my favourite characters I’ve ever written. I’m so glad what I wanted with him translated well!
8 Likes
How To Make Eggplant Lasagna (With Cats!), by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier
In addition to sharing what looks like a pretty yummy recipe, How To Make Eggplant Lasagne (With Cats!), very accurately captures cats’ behavior and attitude (that mixture of indifference, contempt, and adorableness). For example when you try to “dislodge” your larger, dumber cat Boris from your recipe, he stands up, pivots 180 degrees, and sits right back down back down. When you squirt water at your cat Natasha to get her off the stovetop while you preheat the oven, she freezes and glares at you. For me, the exclamation mark in the title does a lot of work to set the tone and parameters of the game. It suggests that you’ll be in for challenges and antics (in a sort of crying laughter emoji plus gritted teeth emoji way), but you won’t have to worry that choosing to ignore the cats would result in them setting the whole house on fire or seriously injuring themselves. The key to success, HTMEL(WC!) suggests, is being able to adjust your expectations (downward, obviously), and being adaptable. This funny and well written game contains a surprising amount of variation that rewards replaying, enabling you to experience many different combinations of chaos, ending up with anywhere between the best lasagne you’ve ever eaten, and no lasagne at all.
EDIT: corrected typos
8 Likes
VESPERTINE, by Sophia de Augustine
I opened up VESPERTINE having missed the whole Goncharov moment. Still, I found a lot to enjoy this game. It is brimming with sensual descriptions–the pressure of pen on paper, of fingers on skin. Desire is portrayed as being at once voracious, destructive, desiccating. What felt most erotic to me were the descriptions of characters watching each other, and the descriptions of hands–Andrey’s hands holding an espresso cup, fidgeting with the knife, caressing the pages of his book. (As an aside, I notice this about Adrien Brody’s hands, too. I feel like he manipulates small objects with a practiced artistry that makes me wonder if perhaps he had previously trained as a mime or close up magician?)
One of the most intriguing aspects of VESPERTINE was how different perspectives are woven through the narrative. The main text seems to be in third person–but limited to Andrey’s perspective; the highlighted text connects (via a short popup in Goncharov’s POV) to sections that seem to be third person omniscient; and the footnotes link to passages narrated in first person, as Goncharov. I was puzzled by this choice at first, because Goncharov the film does not seem to be explicitly about textuality, scholarship, citation, different ways of reading, etc.–at least in the same way that a game like Harmonia is about those things. Goncharov the meme/arg, however, is kind of built on that. So in that rather meta way, the format–and its foregrounding of the ways that we “read” texts–really makes sense. There are diegetic ways in which the format is effective, too. “Goncharov’s” footnotes, commenting on “Andrey’s” exposed text, feel invasive, appraising, erotic. I don’t know, maybe that’s reading into things a bit too much. But the text-footnote dynamic did make me wonder: even though Andrey must/will eventually kill Goncharov (I think?), who is really being hunted? Who really is in control? Both are questions that, likewise, sexually charge the dynamic between the two men.
VESPERTINE was the perfect length for a brief but evocative interlude in a larger story. Just when I started to get antsy and wonder whether the plot was going to advance, it was over. It left me feeling curious about the overall Goncharov story, but at the same time satisfied with this glimpse.
EDIT: corrected typos
6 Likes
Dark Communion, by alyshkalia
Dark Communion’s most critical choice comes not at the end of the game, but at the beginning. You the player must define how the PC (a teenage girl) is related to Laina (another teenage girl), who is leading you into an abandoned church. Is she a younger sister you’re protecting/competing with, some girl that you kind of know from school but don’t really like, or a crush you’re trying to impress? In addition to affecting flavor text along the way, this choice affects how motivated you’ll be (and what options you’ll have) to help Laina when things unsurprisingly take a turn for the supernatural.
This game encourages exploration on multiple levels. There is the literal exploration of the “big, old, gothic church,” with its “racks of half-melted candles,” its rows of empty pews, “most of which have been nudged out of their neat rows, as if shuffled by the fingers of a giant hand,” and its fractured light, illuminating the faces of judgemental saints. I loved these brief yet evocative descriptions. Exploration in this sense creates a sense of mounting unease. In a particularly chilling sequence, you can choose to ignore Laina’s calls from the balcony, and continue exploring on your own instead. A few turns later, you notice that “Laina is quiet now.”
You can also explore the game by replaying it. There’s an achievements screen that incentivizes you to explore different choices at the beginning, and throughout the game. Indeed, there is a lot more branching and variation than you might expect in such a short game.
What was most rewarding for me was shining my flashlight into the quiet alcoves of the church, and through that, exploring the PC’s relationship with her spirituality and her relationship with her sister/acquaintance/crush. I actually found this to be even more compelling than the final confrontation. It reminded me of one of the author’s EctoComp games, Loneliest House. In that game, the act of leisurely looking at the details of the house–and speculating about past and future human presence–was so captivating. It’s a game where the real story takes shape in the negative space–similar to what Tricks of light in the forest does, but on a much smaller scale. It made me wonder what Dark Communion would be like if it had developed this aspect a bit further.
All in all, great writing, tight story (even some humor!), and very replayable. I highly recommend this game!
6 Likes
Thank you for the lovely review—I’m glad you enjoyed it!
3 Likes
If there’s a quicker way to get me to play a game than another reviewer saying it’s like Twin Peaks, then I’m hard pressed to identify it ;)!
Romance the Backrooms, by Naomi Norbez
Since this is a demo of a larger work in progress, I’m writing this more as feedback rather than a review. I should also disclose that I am not familiar with otome, and, while I’m familiar with the general concept of the backrooms, I’m not well versed in all the lore at all. Those things have, of course, affected my experience of this game.
I was immediately captivated by the game’s premise, its anodyne elevator music, and its strange illustrations. I really love games where you explore weird worlds, and Romance the Backrooms definitely delivered!
A couple of quibbles: I didn’t have a good sense of who the main character was, and what their non-backrooms life was like. The dialogue, which to my ear felt a little stilted sometimes, didn’t provide much characterization either. So when it came time for me to choose whether to remain at the side of the king or try to escape back to the frontrooms, the decision didn’t feel particularly consequential either way. If, as I suspect, the PC was intentionally left a blank slate so that the player could insert themselves, then perhaps it might help to offer some options for the player to establish their motivation and backstory a bit.
I also got the sense that the game might be relying more heavily on the visuals than the language to characterize the world. I wondered whether the language could perhaps be made to do a bit more. For example, descriptions like “some kind of strange funhouse, with primary colors everywhere” and “old cars and houses” didn’t create as strong a sense of immersion as very vivid and specific descriptions like “peeling wallpaper that smells like mustard.”
That said, these things were more than made up for by the sheer bonkers-ness of the world, the originality (and “endearingness”) of the NPCs, and the attention to detail in the deceptively simple looking illustrations. For instance, I noticed that Glarence’s hair eyeballs are almost always looking in the same direction as his “face” eyeballs. Grotto the lampost-headed dog (different than the king’s burgundy-eyed mini lion), has a lightbulb at the end of his tail. When Zenobos is afraid (which is often) his eye-spiral contracts. What?!?!
Outside the backrooms themselves, I have no reference point for this game’s particular kind of weirdness. Twin Peaks? Maybe. Maybe those Meow Wolf things? That Robin WIlliams movie Toys? Scooby Doo? Adventure Time? One Way Ticket, the IF about the strange corn town? I’ve honestly got nothing, and I absolutely love that! I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I know it will be completely original. I can’t wait.
5 Likes
NYX, by 30x30
NYX, a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, takes on the largest of topics–humanity itself–in the smallest number of words: 496. It condenses a sense of vastness, of space and time, into just a few moments. The first person narration feels intimate; the framing (as a final transmission from a doomed space capsule) feels remote. The game vacillates between those conceptual antipodes in a way that feels shimmery and almost playful. This play even occurs on the level of the language itself, in the modulation between longer, layered sentences (“Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut’s — dear God, please don’t let me fuck this up — why me when there’s something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?”), and short, direct ones (“I am the only one left.”).
The only choice in the game comes at the very end, when you decide whether you will let your spacecraft return to earth with an alien species on board or whether you will draw the danger away from earth by letting the spacecraft drift. If I had a small criticism it would be that letting the spacecraft drift and letting the entity in didn’t feel all that differentiated as choices, because it seemed as though the entity had already been inside the spacecraft, and if not, it was on the verge of breaking in anyway. But overall NYX understands that the particulars of the hostile entity are not as important as how the humans react to it. “Beautiful and terrible and surreal” is all we need to know. It could be a plague or it could be an epiphany. You could even substitute “the unknown,” “uncertainty,” or “lack of control” for whatever is outside the spacecraft. The game would be just as meaningful, because the alien species was never terribly important; NYX was always about the humans.
5 Likes