11 | LPM | THE ABANDONED HOUSE DOWN THE LANE
11 | LPM | THE ABANDONED HOUSE DOWN THE LANE
by: EldritchRenaissanceCake
Progress:
- I reached the end in about 12 minutes or so, then played through quickly a second time to absorb more of the details.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This is, interestingly, the second La Petite Mort game that I’ve played today that was a parser game exploring an abandoned house, and have an unexpected twist. This one went very differently! It has a more gothic feel to it, with the former opulence of the home hinted at, and it builds toward what feels like an inevitable betrayal, with a surprising outcome.
Things I Appreciated:
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I’m impressed with how developed the game is given the time limit. There are a lot of rooms and objects implemented. Part of the reason that this worked is that the game explicitly names the objects at each location that you can examine. This allowed me to sidestep most of the parser issues as a player and only focus on what was actually implemented, which feels like a great development strategy for getting the most out of the four hours and getting that in front of the player efficiently.
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I enjoyed the narrative of the piece. As you get closer and closer to the end, the tension builds. It seems the player is headed for disaster, going deeper into what ends up becoming clear is a vampire’s home. But at the climactic moment, where it seems like you are about to die, the game subverts that and the vampire gives you a hug after you help him recover his strength. After playing so many really tense and disturbing games in this response tour of Ectocomp (which is great, don’t get me wrong), I really enjoyed the chance to just like… help, and hug a chill monster guy who was going through a rough patch. I don’t even need to do VampireApologist propaganda here, the author has kindly done that work for me already! This easily became one of my favorite moments in all of EctoComp so far. I guess I really am trash for narratives where you get to help a scary monster and it works out
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While the puzzles weren’t overly complicated or anything, there was a surprising number of steps (in a good way) to get through the house. There was a point where I had amassed a number of objects in my inventory and wasn’t sure quite what to do next, which I didn’t expect from a parser game developed in that amount of time.
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I enjoyed the details in the design of the house that built toward the revelation of who was living there. I thought they were found a good balance of invoking tropes pointing to the answer (broken mirror, old European portraits hinting at aristocracy) and still offering something fresh and distinctive (like the mysterious crow statue).
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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I actually really love the visual aesthetic; I think it contributes a lot of style to the ambience of the game. My main complaint is just, with both the italic and pixelated effects, it was somewhat challenging to read. I think either effect alone (pixelated or italic) would’ve been fine, but both together was a bit much.
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I enjoyed the environmental storytelling. It’s clever. On the first playthrough, it feels more sinister—a creepy crow statue, everything being broken and rotten, the suspicious contraption in the basement. But on the second time through, knowing the ending, I noticed how the presentation as a horror game caused me to misread what was actually there. This wasn’t some terrible, cursed place, it was a cozy space that had just fallen into disrepair. And the machine, able to produce synthetic blood in some fashion, suggests that this is a not a vampire that is hunting down people to survive. But the element I found myself wanting is, some kind of hint or explanation as to how the vampire had fallen into this state, weakened to the point where he couldn’t proceed without the player’s intervention. If there were clues for this, I wasn’t able to find them. Again, time limit and all that, but that’s an area for further light development to add some details that help hint at the backstory.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Once again, with so many of these, I feel endlessly impressed by how much people are able to make with their four hours of development time. It’s really inspiring! Here, I liked the strategy of minimizing the parser aspect (directly naming all relevant objects in the room and using a very limited verb set) so it still retained the parser feel while minimizing extraneous writing work. It was a thoughtful approach to the competition prompt.
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This is a good example of using details in the environment to help the reader fill in the blanks about the story. The description of the contraption in the basement doesn’t really tell you anything about how it works, but in the context of the game and what it does, I sort of filled in my own details as to what it was for and what it meant for the narrative. This indicates to me that there is a wisdom in the restriction of a time limit like this, where it forces the author to sketch things out in a more impressionistic way for the reader, rather than risk over-explaining things and perhaps dulling the intrigue of the descriptions.
Memorable Moment:
- For sure, it was the build-up to the hug.