2 | LPM | RUSTJAW
2 | LPM | RUSTJAW
by: mathbrush
Progress:
- I played for about 11 minutes, checking out many of the different paths.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- The game reminded me the most of the genre of Creepypasta fanfiction, where people write these kind of overwrought Hot Topic-y narratives about cryptids that they’ve either invented or seen elsewhere and are writing their own versions of, or ship together. For instance, the titular Rustjaw is a send-up of “haunted evil animatronics” characters that you might find in something like Five Nights at Freddy’s. This is essentially a parody of that genre. In terms of tone, the piece straddles the line of taking people who like romance narratives with monsters seriously, while also lightly poking fun at them. (I say “them,” but I really should be saying, you know, “us,” or “me”
). I did sort of feel like I was being called out, and it’s something I’m kind of sensitive about, but I can also accept being asked to examine the more absurd aspects of it. At the same time, the author chose to write a monster romance sim with their four hours so, you know, that’s kind of a funny choice if they actually dislike the genre. You can choose to have fun with it, face a tragic end, or escape, so there’s a lot of room for the player to explore their options. Mostly, I just thought it was funny and cute!
Things I Appreciated:
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This game was very funny to me because of how the game and I clocked each other immediately. Oh no, a big scary monster guy, how… terrible… this is such a bad thing that’s happening, anyway, now we’re a couple going on a date
. As a result, me playing this game is a mix between the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme and the I-know-what-you-are dog meme. So I had a pretty fun time with it! I had my hair tied up while playing, but otherwise I would have undoubtedly twirled my fingers through it. -
I really enjoyed the custom art and descriptions of the four monsters. My favorite monster design and backstory was “Icicle Face,” who felt the most like a kind of legendary figure of a betrayed, vengeful woman. I found that compelling, and found the artistic depiction to be very expressive and evocative.
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I thought there was quite a lot of branching endings considering the development limit. While, naturally, a lot of text between the different endings is borrowed, it still allows the player a nontrivial amount of customization of their experience in the game.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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The most immersion breaking moment I had happened in my first playthrough, where I happened to pick Icicle Face. I saw this text: “‘Did you see the way the human looked at you?’ says Icicle Face to Icicle Face. ‘Looks like he has a favorite.’” This stopped me in my tracks as I was trying to figure out why she was talking to herself. It turns out that Icicle Face is always the speaker for this scene, so if you pick her route she ends up talking to herself like this. It seems like there should be a backup character to say this dialogue if you are on her route in particular.
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Similarly, there were formatting errors that caught me off guard later—Icicle Face’s dialogue was presented as italics rather than in quotation marks as earlier, so it made me wonder whether she was communicating with me telepathically rather than speaking out loud. These are the kinds of minor formatting errors that tripped me up while playing, that could be cleaned up if a post-comp release is planned.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I really liked the features that aided replay—where I could skip through certain scenes once I already knew how the game worked. Despite the short development time, thought went into the fact that the player was likely to play again, and how to streamline that experience a bit.
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This piece had a lot of examples of, and you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing the technical term for this, but conditional text? Where, for efficiency of writing under the duress of the time limit, the player can encounter the same scenes on different routes with the names of characters swapped out. I thought this was an elegant compromise in terms of offering variety and some new text while accepting the reality that there isn’t time to write everything custom and maintain the level of player choice.
Memorable Moment:
- It was probably when I got to eavesdrop the conversation between the monsters talking about me. Oh no, how very dare they call attention to the situation!