12 | LGG | YOUR LIFE, AND NOTHING ELSE by: Lionstooth
Progress:
I reached the end in about 13 minutes
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This reminded me the most of the depiction of hell in No Exit, a Sartre play. The characters are trapped in a liminal, mostly empty room. You might not be so surprised to learn that they… can’t exit. (Or, perhaps, won’t exit, due to their character flaws.) What I gathered from this IF piece is a kind of blurring of afterlife concepts, an eternal existence where the protagonist could choose to experience anything but is tormenting themselves in this disturbing space. You can choose to show interest in what your neighbors are doing, and sometimes help them with whatever they are struggling with, but none of them will ever check on you. The game in this way is also a kind of depression simulator, where the repetitive going-through-the-motions of it all is mainly punctuated by horrific imagery or self-loathing. In that sense, there’s a strong psychological aspect to the horror here.
Things I Appreciated:
Well this game gets the first of my Selina-Meyer-what-the f*cks of my EctoComp playing experience. What really stands out to me is the gradual weirdification of what starts off as a very ordinary space, enhanced by text effects like motion, appearance/disappearance, and so on. At first, I caught motion out of the corner of my eye at the beginning of the game and dismissed it, but then that turned out to actually be happening. The game made me doubt what I had already experienced when things were slightly askew, which I thought was an effective way to escalate the tension.
I liked the gradual buildup of hell/afterlife imagery: the oppressive heat (not to mention the fire risk) of too many candles, the pomegranate, dizzying fumes. These images are what grounded the piece for me.
I really liked the use of red “visited” links, if that makes sense. One of the most disturbing moments of the piece came early for me. After the first round of visiting the neighbors and delivering some water to one of them, I returned to my room to rest. And then… well, I was greeted with a screen with all the links already red. That was a moment of genuine horror for me, because I thought… wait. Oh no. I’ve already done… everything? That’s all there is? Am I stuck here? What now? So over the course of the game, the red-stained links came to represent entrapment for me, that I had already reached the limits of my eternity and would still, nonetheless, have to keep going.
Miscellaneous Comments:
A tricky writing challenge I think in writing something like this is that, when you write something in an ambiguous or abstract style, the gap between the player and the narrative can widen. I tried to latch onto anything specific I could to get a stronger sense of the characters, especially the protagonist, but the dissociative aspect of the presentation made it difficult to form a deeper emotional connection. Arguably, that might be a good thing, because of the nature of the piece and what it seems to be getting at—the denial of mirrors preventing the reader from using visual cues to make sense of who they’re playing as, for instance, feeding into the character’s self-denial. But I’m left with a feeling that I’m not fully sure what I experienced.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This piece made great use of timed effects to create paranoia and unease. Using these effects to disorient the player and make them feel off-kilter makes a lot of sense for this kind of horror piece, so it has me thinking about how I could use minor timed effects in a subtle way, or in a more dramatic way, to control the pace of a piece’s tension.
I thought it was interesting that there were a lot of dead ends in the piece, as in, places you could click to visit but the character will refuse to visit. Upon reflection, I realized that this happens a lot in parser games for a much different reason: to constrain map size. Like I could go into a random room, attempt to head north, the parser is like “lol no you can’t go that way”. But in a Twine narrative that is more controlled, these dead ends are intentionally constructed (I can’t just type “go north,” “go north” would have to be programmed in to specifically appear to me as a hyperlink) as ways to simulate the experience of feeling trapped or unmotivated. I wouldn’t have questioned the lack of a “go up” link, but since it was there I clicked it and was told I couldn’t go up, which is part of the core theme of the game. I don’t know, I just found that to be an interesting narrative technique.
Memorable Moment:
Honestly it was when I went to fetch the mail and the mail was just like… gibberish symbols. That’s when things reached a tipping point where I knew that everything from now on was going to get weird af.
I’m glad. I played this earlier today and wanted to leave a comment but couldn’t work out what I wanted to say. I think DemonApologist has covered it better than I could in this review!
13 | LGG | DO NOT LET YOUR LEFT HAND KNOW
by: Naarel
Progress:
I reached the end of the piece in about 28 minutes. (I was really absorbed in the narrative so I’m a little surprised it wasn’t a longer amount of time. Perception is weird like that!)
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This piece is big on body horror for sure, and bodysnatching/invasion narratives. The idea of losing your body to someone else, losing time/memory, etc., is a very palpable horror theme that is on full display here. But you know what this piece really felt like? It felt like the trolley problem You are forced to select between two very bad and ethically dubious options, and make your peace with that.
Things I Appreciated:
Fair warning, this is going to be a weird personal tangent, but I had a distinctive/specific experience of reading this piece—especially the kind of thesis line in it, “That’s the danger - once you let your left hand know what it’s like to lead, it will never want to go back under the right hand’s rule.”—because I’m left-handed. No doubt, it’s the source of my various… sinister personality traits. But my handedness has a weird backstory. (I recognize that it’s a bit weird to even have a backstory for handedness at all.) Basically, I’m told by family members that I trust, that when I was very young, I would just write on the left side of paper with my left hand, and on the right side of paper with my right hand. My mom, who is left-handed and grew up in a cultural context where she was punished/criticized by the older generations for being left-handed, decided to make me left-handed. I don’t know exactly why, but my guess is that it was a kind of petty revenge against the social and cultural power of righthandedness that so affected her growing up. So I became left-handed and still am, though later in childhood I happened to take a grip strength test and it turned out that my right hand was actually stronger. My belief is that I probably “should have been” right-handed, but it got intercepted due to these idiosyncratic social reasons. As a result I have what I assume is a bit atypical mixed-handedness where I do precision tasks like write, draw, chop vegetables etc with my left hand but do more physical sports/tasks right-handed. Anyway, I explain this because the in-game metaphor using handedness to represent something else, is something that literally happened to me? My mom let my left hand know what it was like to lead, and I became left-handed. How weird to have a (mostly) on-topic reason to discuss this in an IF response. Please leave your own weird handedness backstories in the comments! (/s)
While reading the entire piece, I knew from before it started that I would pick the left hand just based on the weird personal identity I have around handedness I discussed above. But when I got there, I was legitimately torn. I’ll explain why. On the surface, the left hand felt like the obvious correct choice at the outset—Monica seems to actually yearn for life, to exist, in a way that Lisa doesn’t. Monica didn’t have the chance to start with a body, and it felt fundamentally unfair that she was cursed with the “inferior” position within the body by default. I sided with her immediately because of this. But a detail about Lisa really affected me though—the fact that she is just… allowed to be suffering in the office for days with no one bothering to check on her. Lisa has been treated as disposable by the world. In reaching the choice, I felt horrible because I was faced with deciding who deserves a chance to keep living in this body, and even though it felt like the correct choice to pick left, I was aware of the fact that I, like the people in the office, had treated Lisa as disposable and unworthy of her life. By the end, even though it is (apparently?) the case that Lisa was the actual “changeling,” or perhaps, both were changelings alternating back and forth throughout time with no true “original,” I felt a terrible sense of regret and unease about choosing to push her out and essentially declaring that her life was somehow worth less. As if I should get to decide that. It’s rough.
So what do the “left” and “right” represent here? I mean, I think it’s an open enough idea that you could apply a lot of concepts to. But what bubbled to the top of my mind here was the idea of a “work persona” vs. a “home persona.” In my last job as a grad student/instructor I often thought of putting my work clothes on as like… doing drag, but in a bad/unfun way, and arriving back at home to immediately change into normal clothes as “de-dragging.” I felt deeply out of place and uncomfortable in my work persona, wearing clothes I hated, being assigned attention and authority that I didn’t really want. (Let me tell you, nothing made me more nostalgic for the comparatively amazing experience of taking classes than having to teach them. Actual nightmare fuel) . So I interpreted the right hand as like, a version of yourself that is drawn out of you by capitalism (in this case, Lisa is like an office worker persona who lives for spreadsheets), and the left hand as perhaps, who you yearn to be or would be if not for that.
Miscellaneous Comments:
I thought this was really cleanly edited overall. The main gripe I have with it is the lack of dialogue tags (or if not tags for style reasons, some kind of color or other way of differentiating it). This is a minor gripe; most of the time, I could tell through context who was speaking, but the occasional times that I got lost were pretty much the only things disrupting me out of what was otherwise an immersive and gripping narrative. I noticed toward the end that mousing over dialogue would cause it to become bold, which may have helped a bit earlier, but instead just accidentally jumpscared me later in the narrative the first time I encountered it. (I’ve gotten jumpscared by so many ridiculous things already this EctoComp and I haven’t even played Jump-scar-é Manor yet, I’m so nervous for that one )
One minor element that slightly pushed me out of the narrative was the exposition about the changeling that Vivienne gives. It’s good context to have, and I thought some effort was made to make it connect to her trans narrative so it makes sense in-universe as something for her to talk about, but I still felt like the author is taking me aside and sitting me down to tell me this background info, in a way that I never felt at any other point in the story.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
Well it was fun to play essentially a Single Choice Jam game out of that context, because I have experience with that prompt and still cling to fond feelings about my game that seemingly almost no one played! I had a Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-in-recognition moment at realizing it was a single choice game. I really appreciated how tough the choice was here, I thought I would know what to choose but I still had a hard time picking what I thought was the less bad option. Since this is the only choice in the narrative, it needed to pack a disproportionate punch and it absolutely did.
I really liked how the right-aligned, left-aligned, and center-aligned text worked to communicate point of view switches and dialogue vs. thoughts, I was fascinated by how the left/right alignment in the narrative was also portrayed visually.
Memorable Moment:
For sure, it was when Lisa watched the video footage of herself being left in the office for days with no one helping her, that really affected me.
This is (as detailed by the blurb) an anthology of games made by creative writing students in 2 hours or less, so I had to throw my standard response format into the trash, where it undoubtedly belongs.
Instead, I decided to just give an overall impression of each of the micro-games and an overall reflection at the end.
Room 10, by Smurfs
Progress: I played through all the endings in about 1m15s
This seemed to be an exploration of branching narratives, choose-your-own-adventure style, with one good ending and several dead-end/bad endings. I was most amused by the choice to do nothing, or complaining to the manager about the POOL OF BLOOD, being punished.
Room 16, by Big Pig
Progress: I reached the “to be continued” screen in about 1m02s
Once again, I was punished for doing nothing! I guess I need to learn to be less lazy here. This game is building toward a progressive format in terms of having the player returning to the same room each year with skill upgrades, so presumably if given more than 2 hours to work on this, the encounters in the room would build on themselves over time.
Room 102, by The Pumkins
Progress: I reached the good ending in about 1m45s
This time, I resisted the temptation to select the obviously bad “give up and die” option and actually made it through. I liked the attention to detail in the opening scene, to establish the uncanniness of the setting (odd photographs, being assigned a room on the “negative fifth floor.’)
Room 113, by Enterci
Progress: I searched through most, if not all of the branches, in about 2 minutes.
Something I really liked was getting to play as a specific type of character—a werewolf—and that was referenced again later. Building consistency of character is important! I also liked that the choices weren’t always “obviously good” vs. “obviously bad”, so there is some tension in making choices without a clear correct answer. On the other hand, that can also make it feel a bit arbitrary when doing something that seems reasonable enough works out so terribly!
Room 444, by Four Dolls
Progress: I read through the branches in about 1m38s
I thought the horror element was well developed here—enough time is spent on developing the backstory for the dolls, and then if you make bad choices, you may join their uncanny ranks. I liked the sense of progression here as a result, with the dolls overwhelming the scene as the game moves forward.
Room 505, by Storyteller
Progress: I reached a good ending in around 2 minutes, and spend another minute or two trying to figure out what to enter into the text box for the right hand (I guessed things like, “purgatory,” “arena,” “orlando,” and “room 505,” which all gave an error message.)
I really liked the text box popup, even if I wasn’t able to solve it. It was an engaging idea for a puzzle and I liked the format change. I also thought some of the death screens were pretty funny, like, congratulations, you became a great Halloween decoration!
Room 555, by Tach
Progress: I reached the end and looked at a few branches in about 1m10s
I thought the use of the soda bottle was creative. I laughed at first at it being described as an “epic weapon” against dark forces, so seeing it being used to plug the hole in the ventilation unit was amusing. In general, thinking of creative ways of using otherwise ordinary objects can be a good approach to designing puzzles in choice-based narratives.
Room 666, by Yuyu & Mimi
Progress: I reached many bad endings in a total of 2m09s.
I really liked the concept of the haunted mirror, it’s a horror trope but an effective one. There was also a motif of losing eyes across a couple of the different endings, so I liked the consistency of that. In a true horror fashion, I guess it’s fitting that all the endings here appeared to be bad ones.
Overall thoughts:
This was cool! I’m glad everyone who contributed got a chance to test out building a narrative in Twine with a time limit, it’s a good practice to write something with constraints/a deadline because it forces you to focus and get something done rather than just endlessly drafting or getting stuck on a blank page. Despite the unifying hotel theme, each of these pieces felt distinctive and took that theme in a different direction. The main, overarching advice I would give, for future work in building choice-based narratives, is to be thoughtful about what type of choices to present. For instance, sometimes choices here were arbitrary: pick between two different colors, with no real hint to the correct answer. It’s not always the most satisfying to have your fate determined by luck alone. (The humor and ability to undo/redo does lessen the blow of course!) Other times, there were choices where one choice is obviously good and one is obviously bad choice, so there wasn’t much tension in the choice when only one option is appealing. While different situations call for different types of choices, I think something to keep in mind is to provide a choice where multiple options are plausible things that someone might want to do (for instance: should you stay and fight? or run/escape?) or are attached to different emotions. If there’s only one obvious/reasonable course of action, should it even be a choice? You, as the author, get to choose where those decision points are, so it’s helpful to reflect on times that you had to make challenging decisions and think about how to evoke that type of feeling in the reader.
Great thanks for so much nourishing feedback. It is always a highlight of the day when reviews from this community are shared with the authors. The popularity of IF is steadily growing in here mostly thanks to your hard work, the reviewer’s. Namely Four Dolls are sending their special thanks.
15 | LGG | HOW TO FLY A KITE / CÓMO VOLAR UNA COMETA
15 | LGG | HOW TO FLY A KITE / CÓMO VOLAR UNA COMETA by: rubereaglenest
Progress:
I reached the end in about 9 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
There is a major sense of escalation to this piece. It starts innocently enough, but each successive mini-scene builds an overall portrait of real-life ongoing carnage and devastation. The horror for me was in the revelation—at some point or another, one of the details will flag the reader’s realization as to what this piece is really about, and it’s a sobering recognition. There is also a body horror element in being a spirit that is trying desperately to make a difference and help provide some guidance and hope in the midst of the destruction but is struggling with their new form to try and make this possible.
Things I Appreciated:
There is a non-linearity to the narrative, where you can approach building each piece of the kite in the order of your choosing. The piece is a kind of portrait where each fragment is drawn to add up to the full picture, which mirrors the construction of the kite a symbol of hope/resistance amidst violence. So I would say that the narrative of what you are actually “doing” in the text is well-aligned with the themes of the piece.
Similarly, I thought the details were subtle enough at the beginning, I wasn’t sure where it was going, but then at the big moment of recognition I had, previously innocuous details—like the coating of dust, the gray canvas—are suddenly cast in a terrible new light.
Miscellaneous Comments:
In terms of the mechanics, I found myself occasionally cycling through some of the options and having the same messages reprinted, unsure if I was making progress or not. While that is somewhat immersive in the sense that, as a spirit not necessarily accustomed to manipulating objects in supernatural ways, it makes sense that it doesn’t unfold smoothly, I found myself becoming distracted by my own clumsiness in not always understanding what progress I was making and preoccupied with the gameplay elements, perhaps a bit at the expense of absorbing more of the weight/impact of the narrative. Those were just minor moments of discombobulation for me though, it didn’t detract much.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I think this is the first comp piece I’ve read that has such a direct and contemporary activist message, and it does that very effectively. It has me thinking about how the interactivity of an IF piece has a kind of potential to involve the reader emotionally by making them explicitly part of what is happening in the narrative, in a way that other genres/forms might. (Of course, good journalism and facts and statistics have their place, and more “static” literary/allegorical works as well, but I thought this was a good example of cutting across that with a different, inspired approach.)
Memorable Moment:
For me, it was at the point of describing the four colors of the pennants from the demolished wedding scene that I realized what was happening. (Admittedly, I should’ve taken a closer look at the cover art…) Suddenly, the previous details clicked into place, and with a sinking feeling, I started to dread the new details that were inevitably about to emerge.
I reached the end in about 50 minutes, with moderate use of the walkthrough. (I was a bit nervous to play this one after the Dog Arson Incident™/Biscuitgate™ in Miss Gosling’s Last Case, but the walkthrough/hints were just right for me and avoided causing me to death spiral while playing like happened there!)
Engagement with Horror Genre:
Overall, this is wacky comedy horror, so the horror elements aren’t really that threatening due to the tone. For instance, one can imagine an alternate depiction of an infestation of self-replicating information being legitimately terrifying, but because of the mood of the piece, it’s more funny than anything. It’s also a case where you are playing as what would often be the villain of a narrative (and arguably, still kind of is. Even the hints have BlobApologist propaganda in them, how delightful!).
Things I Appreciated:
I thought this was an entertaining game; a lot of academia humor. (I especially appreciated the gentle skewering of the music theory department with its “penthemitonic scale” and microtones, but there were many amusing jokes throughout the rooms.) My favorite environmental element was probably the changing notice board with IF community in-jokes that I’m now marginally better equipped to appreciate given the last few months.
The scope of the game felt right—there isn’t a huge number of rooms, but the puzzles are still fairly difficult. I liked the exclamation points directing me to the rooms that I could do more in, it helped focus my attention. In a similar sense, there isn’t a huge number of powers that you can gain, but it’s just enough that I did not feel like it was worth my time to try every command, and just focused more on trying to think about which commands would actually make sense for the situations that I was in. I had a few “aha” moments as a result, which made those puzzles feel satisfying.
I especially liked the visual presentation. The seafoam green interactable text color is especially pleasing, and the game feels polished both visually and mechanically. The minimap at the top of the screen also contributes a lot to easing navigation and directing attention to puzzles.
Miscellaneous Comments:
After thinking about the puzzles, the one that doesn’t sit right with me is “resonate” being the solution for the bowl of arsenic. Something that is full of powder wouldn’t resonate well at all, right? It would be dampened by the presence of the powder. Like imagine hitting a metal bowl with your fist to cause it to ring. If it’s empty, works great. If you poured some sand in it, and tried again, it wouldn’t work. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal because one could either read the walkthrough or just… through process of elimination, resonate the bowl, but it felt like a distinctly unnatural solution to me.
I had a minor issue with the prepare/escape mechanic on the minimap. So, if you prepare a shell, it puts an O on the map in that room. After I learned that clicking on a room would cause you to automatically travel there, I would instinctively click the “O” on the minimap expecting to teleport using the shell, because the O was representing the shell. Instead, clicking on it caused me to walk there and made the gong timer run out. This isn’t a big deal since you can just… retry things, but it did cause me to have to reset the gong a few times while trying to overcome the instinct to click on the O to travel instead of using the “escape” verb.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The main thing I would study here is the minimap, and the different kinds of information it communicates. It directs your attention to certain rooms that have puzzles that you can solve, and even changes to alert you that you’ve done something meaningful (for instance: an exclamation point spontaneously occurs when you ring the gong).
I also thought the verbs were creative and interesting. It was nice to see a different-than-standard set of verbs that nevertheless made sense. It helps to refresh the player’s mind with a new set of verbs to avoid a lot of the assumptions people might be bringing to standard verbs. Though, to be honest, I didn’t play this by entering parser commands, as I just clicked the links instead for this one. But this is a good example of how to control and present the verbs to a player in a way that sidesteps some of the parser game jankiness that occurs when the player is just assumed to clairvoyantly know which verbs to try.
Memorable Moment:
I think my favorite moment was receiving the “transmute” power. I kept encountering what I was referring to myself as “Chekhov’s suspiciously specific metals” where objects were described as being pure nickel, zinc, gold, lead, etc., and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that information. So when I finally gained the ability to do something with that information, I was really excited.
Thank you for the review! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
The bowl of arsenic is definitely the thing that the most people have gotten stuck on. The intent is that it’s so precariously balanced that any vibration sends it toppling, but we never quite found a way to convey that right.
17 | LGG | LIKE A SKY FULL OF LOCUSTS by: Ryan Veeder
Progress:
I reached the end in around 45 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
There’s a lot going on here. At the core of it is this kind of religious horror—the colonel inflicts his morality on everyone else and opens a hellmouth to doom everyone else. It’s a bit like survival horror, in the sense that ammo seems limited, until the point in the game that you finally realize that you can’t really waste bullets much. There’s also a kind of meta element to it. At the very beginning, when I entered the “transcript” command, the game gave me the ominous message “Surely you are not so foolish as to transcribe…” and indeed at the end, I got the message “This game session has ended,” implying the narrator’s death, making it more difficult to extract the transcript. Not to mention the story-within-a-story and the apparent punishment of the critics who found many faults with the tale.
Things I Appreciated:
I probably don’t have to explain that “shooting demons” is not my preferred pastime. (I kept trying to talk to them… lol). But setting that aside, I thought the game was mechanically interesting. The reason it took me as long to play as it did is not really because of the puzzles or anything like that, but just like… my unwillingness to shoot things both because I didn’t want to, and because I was afraid of running out of bullets. I got the impression from the creative descriptions of the demons that each might require some kind of unique approach to deal with. For instance, one of the first things I encountered was a worm that reacted to sound. Instead of shooting it immediately, I left it alone for a while, with the mindset that I would find some way of dampening sound later to sneak past it and avoid it. No. Literally just… shoot it. That’s it. Throughout the game, I kept hitting dead ends that were 100% psychological because I just had to shoot things and hadn’t shot them yet. So in that sense, I was fascinated with how everything turned out to be an anti-puzzle. The imp keeps escaping? Just shoot it again, it will eventually just work. It was interesting to struggle with my lack of desire/motivation to shoot things, and made for a unique experience as a result.
This piece has a really strong sense of voice/character. I often found myself in a state of friction with the narrator because I wanted to do things he wasn’t interested in doing. I came to appreciate this friction because of the interesting power struggle that ensues. The narrator is recounting his story, and even though I as the player might feel like I have the power to decide what he does, I really don’t. It sort of calls up the illusion of player agency in an interesting way; the player in any parser game almost always has less agency than they are tricked into thinking they have, so being confronted by that and disempowered as a result, was emotionally engaging.
One of my favorite game elements was the pentagram points. When I encountered these glyphs early on, I had no idea what to do with them, and tried things like, for instance, infusing the hellfire into them. When I finally got to the letter, I realized that the five glyphs and their locations corresponded to the Colonel’s wacky religious complaints about the fort’s sins. This wasn’t mechanically that important, in the sense that it didn’t speed up solving the game, but I did find it interesting as a storytelling device.
Miscellaneous Comments:
I guess some of the things I described above could be reframed as criticisms. Why give these elaborate, unique descriptions to the creatures you meet, if their only purpose is to die to your bullets? I think the piece is perhaps meant to feel a bit like a deformed power fantasy (or maybe it’s only deformed to me because of my idiosyncratic hangups). But ultimately, I guess I’m just choosing to look at the side of it where it made for a unique game experience for the game to fool me into thinking I was looking at puzzles when the real puzzle is realizing the obstacles aren’t puzzles.
I’m still a bit puzzled by the prologue and epilogue about the castle as a framing device. While it adds to the tale in introducing the meta-commentary elements, it did risk feeling extraneous to the core story. When I reached “The End” (the first time), and started trying to type “script off,” I was caught off guard when more text suddenly appeared because I hadn’t even been thinking about the castle part of the narrative. Perhaps this is another of the many examples of literary allusions being lost on me/going over my head, which has happened quite a lot so far during these EctoComp responses. Like maybe I shouldn’t really even be writing these. (I say as I blithely continue writing all this nonsense regardless…)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I thought this was a really good example of writing a parser game with a very strong and specific sense of voice, and intentionally creating a gap between the player and the narrator. Often, it seems like parser games try to give the protagonist a more neutral personality to immerse the player, but this shows that writing with a very specific voice and perspective, using error messages to convey what the protagonist is unwilling to do, can be a compelling way of going about things.
Memorable Moment:
The thing that spooked me the most was honestly the custom message for the “transcript” command, it really caught me off guard in a great way and I was still thinking about it going forward. The second memorable moment was when I descended to the bottom of the pit and my instinct was to shoot the colonel (everything here is his fault, after all), but was overruled by the narrator, which I found engaging.
I reached the end of the game in around 25 minutes. I consulted the walkthrough in two cases, and also consulted Michael Behringer’s transcript found here when I was unable to figure out how to phrase the command I needed to do. (Thank you Michael!) The game is actually very direct and straightforward about what you need to be doing, rather, I struggled to find the right parser verbs to use to do the things I was trying to do at those two points.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This game has one supernatural element—you are guided in your mission by a ghost—but they are a very approachable and helpful ghost! The other main genre note here is thriller—your job is to stop a terrorist attack on New York City, so the threat of that violence is the main motivating factor here. All in all, I think this piece nodded at horror but wasn’t really meant to be taken as a horror piece.
Things I Appreciated:
My favorite aspect of the game is navigating around on the boat. There aren’t a huge number of locations here, so it feels very manageable to get comfortable moving between those locations using commands like “forward,” “aft,” etc. I thought the directions were always signaled well in the location descriptions, with a sentence reminder of what direction the exits were.
I also liked the ghost note system, because if at any point you are not quite sure what to do, re-visiting the galley gives you something that will put you right back on track. I thought this was a great way to keep the supernatural element woven into the otherwise very grounded narrative.
In general, my thought is that this is a great proof-of-concept for a boat travel based game, and mainly I would just see it developed further given more time to flesh out the parser language, locations, etc. The idea of moving different people/objects from dock to dock amidst a crisis is a great premise for a game, and really, I just would’ve loved to see more done here!
Miscellaneous Comments:
My number one issue with this piece is simply, the pickiness of the parser. You can see in my attached transcript that I struggled at two major bottlenecks: setting a dial for the first time, and then turning on the pump power switch. In both these cases, I made many guesses that seemed reasonable, but were not recognized as valid commands. It was like the correct command was a too-bright sun that I kept glancing around the edge of and not seeing even though it was right there and I couldn’t figure it out even with the walkthrough. I don’t necessarily mind a parser linguistic challenge, but it didn’t match the tone of the game—which was very direct in telling me what I should do next, so I thought more could be done here to anticipate the kinds of commands that people might guess when presented with the instructions. In other words, there is friction between the tone of the game and the implementation of the verbs.
The protagonist of this game always knows what to do in this crisis situation. For instance, they know instantly that they need to transport the SWAT team to the bridge. This is good characterization in the sense that it is reasonable for an experienced captain to know how to proceed. But the calmness of the captain and the lack of obstacles (other than the out-of-universe parser issues) also kind of blunted the tension of the game for me. For instance, when arriving at the Statue of Liberty to check that location, I am told that I was allowed to dock freely without explaining myself, even though that’s an atypical situation. Having some kind of obstacle here—maybe someone who isn’t handling the crisis as well not believing why I need to dock, as an example—might add tension to the piece if I can’t just execute the plan that the character has in mind from start to finish. I think there are ways of keeping a hyper-competent protagonist like this and creating tension through other means, like forcing them to think of a new plan on the fly so the player feels more like they’ve earned the ending. The most exciting moment of the piece was definitely opening the truck and confronting the terrorist, so I think the narrative could benefit from peppering in more surprises like that here and there!
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
What stands out to me here is the bottlenecking of players by requiring a very specific phrasing of a command when many options are plausible. It brings the pace of the game to a halt when the player has a very clear intention (of turning a dial, for instance) but is not able to convey that in a way the game will recognize. In many parts of the game, the game is very forward in directing the player which verbs to use, but at other times, I seemed not to be able to understand the cue that I was being given. I can only imagine the ungodly amount of coding that must be required to add alternate verbs, but unless you are going to cue every verb for the player, sometimes those alternate options are really needed to get a player through a section that isn’t really intended to be a puzzle.
Memorable Moment:
When I revisited the galley and saw “an Eee” here. I was like wait, WTF is that? I thought that was a good, light spooky moment.
By process of elimination, this means that Nick Neat-Trick-Treat is the last remaining English language Grand Guignol game on my randomized list! I suspect that randomizers hate Andrew Schultz in particular. There was only a 1 in 1273 chance of getting his game assigned last in both IF Comp and Le Grand Guignol (English). Nevertheless, that’s what happened for me.
19 | LGG | NICK NEAT-TRICK-TREAT by: Andrew Schultz
Progress:
I reached the end of this game in (an admittedly dreadful effort on my part) 1 hour and 43 minutes. I made use of the walkthrough for either 2 or 3 of the solutions, but otherwise was able to struggle my way through most of them.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is a game about trick-or-treating and is an entry that is more Halloween-themed than horror-themed, though I guess you could make a case for some very mildly spooky imagery here or there. Overall though, I wouldn’t describe this as a horror piece.
Things I Appreciated:
I really thought my experience from Why Pout would help me more than it actually did. It turns out that, just like there, this type of game is deceptively difficult. How many possible rhyme combinations could there even be? Even though I took about the same amount of time with a much shorter game here (meaning I did worse overall), I used the walkthrough significantly less in this case, so I feel like I was more capable of thinking through these puzzles. I do find this style of word game interesting, even if it causes me to get a bit batty. I like the way that it draws lateral thinking and creative ideas out of me, even when they are completely off-base.
I liked the eye power (when it worked) to help direct my attention to possible solutions. It gave just enough information to help me focus without completely giving away the answers.
The game had a straightforward, but coherent story. I know a game like this is more about the puzzle than the narrative, but the settings more or less made sense to me, as did the kinds of characters and obstacles that I encountered.
Miscellaneous Comments:
Respectfully, this game is an absolute menace. It took me 15 minutes to solve the very first command, because I was really struggling to figure out what phrase to direct my attention to. At different points throughout the game, I had issues because I was unable to pick up the cues as to what to rhyme (for example, I was continuing to make pointless guesses based on the location “And Eee-ing” not understanding that I had been cued to rhyme with “Randy Ring” instead.) I think in general, it’s good to start with an easier puzzle to help the player adjust to the game mechanic, but I found the first puzzle to be one of the hardest in the entire game. (The actual hardest being: the curled key solution). I guess this is pretty subjective though, maybe other players will have a radically different experience of the difficulty, but I can only really comment on my own.
Instead of going through the every glitch and weird thing I encountered, since a post-comp release is planned, I’ll just refer to my attached transcript as the exhaustive account of what happened while I was playing. I do hope it will be helpful! However, there are a few elements that I want to comment on in particular. When trying to solve the bonus points, I tried to take a break to work on other puzzles (figuring that refocusing my mind later would help draw more creative rhyme ideas out of me), only to find that I was blocked from re-entering that location because I had solved the main puzzle there. I think it should be either allowed for you to revisit areas to work on the bonus puzzles, or, it should be made very clear to the player that they will not be allowed to try again later. I also had some trouble with the relationship between the “eye” command and the bonus puzzles. For instance, for the final tree trolled puzzle, the eye command gave me 2 to 4, but the “missed” command at the end told me that the solution was actually “wee wold” which does not match that. That puzzle became impossible for me to solve because I had ruled out three-letter words based on the eye’s disinformation (I actually had guessed “we wold” even though that doesn’t make sense… because a lot of my more desperate guesses don’t really make sense, but the game didn’t tell me how close I was so I could recover.)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The importance of a balanced learning curve! Something I notice that I’ve really harped on as a player across a bunch of games (fairly or not) is command bottlenecking, especially right at the beginning. As a player, it takes me time to warm up. And not even just as a player, honestly. I remember in school in multiple choice exams I had a tic where I would often get only the first 1-2 questions of the exam wrong, and then have no issues for the rest once I had settled in. As annoying as tutorials are, I think I need time to enter super trivial commands that actually work so I can process the game-world that I’m in and adjust. Here, when faced with (what was to me) a steep cliff as the first obstacle, I floundered for a long time.
Memorable Moment:
When the game told me off for submitting “geeky gay” (arguably a description of… myself) as an insult. I don’t know what to tell you, my ethical standards evidently decline when desperation sets in!
Okay, that ought to be a wrap for the nineteen anglophone Le Grand Guignol games! A big thank you to all these authors for a very creative and interesting set of games, I hope my comments weren’t too obnoxious!
Tomorrow, I plan to get started on the La Petite Mort games, though I may need to adjust my response format to account for the 4-hour time limit imposed on the games. (I’m unsure how best to offer feedback that’s useful or relevant for a game/piece where the author is not allowed to improve it anymore… I’ll mull that over I guess.)
Yeah, I can’t speak for every Petite Mort author but I would still find feedback useful for the post-comp release! It might hit on issues I’m aware of but didn’t have time to fix, but that’s okay.
It counts “number of passages seen” / “number of passages”. You’ll reach the end before 66 because of branching. It’s shown by default but the author can disable it in the settings. I find it encourages replay (it works on me ).
Alright, I’m getting started now on La Petite Mort games! Up first…
1 | LPM | FOREVERMORE: A GAME OF WRITING HORROR
1 | LPM | FOREVERMORE: A GAME OF WRITING HORROR by: Stewart C. Baker
Progress:
I played for about 20 minutes, eventually reaching all five endings in this order: (“A Successful Draft,” “Revenge of the Worms,” “The Ravening,” “A Pleasant Day,” and “Too Far Gone.”) To get to the end for the first playthrough took about 6 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is a kind of meta comedy piece skewering writers who are overly self-involved about the darkness of their work. In a kind of amusing way, the more seriously your character takes trying to write something dark, the more ridiculous the poem seems to come across. So overall, this is a piece about the process of trying to write horror, from the perspective of someone who is too concerned with the melodrama of performing the role of “tortured poet” to actually write with convincing gravitas.
Things I Appreciated:
The thing I found most engaging here is the attention to the class status of the writer and how that relates to his work. For the most part, Allen is living a kind of charmed life. It’s a beautiful day, he’s living in a nice neighborhood, and he’s also apparently wealthy enough to have hired a servant who thoughtfully brings him tea and a scone while he’s writing, which he has plenty of time to do. (If you eat the scone, he even admits that he was hungry without realizing it, proving what a thoughtful gesture that was). What you’re left with is a portrait of a character who lacks self-awareness about his situation, and as depicted, his insistence upon writing about dark things feel inauthentic. As I played, my default instinct was to pick choices that (1) advanced the character’s goal of writing something dark and brooding, but (2) behave in a way that was kind and empathetic, which in my view do not have to be mutually exclusive (regardless of the character’s belief). However, this character can’t be corralled into social grace forever—I was forced to either shout at, or slam the window upon seeing a child, so I thought this was an interesting case where the character’s personality eventually overrode my approach as a player.
I loved the choice to include the “brooding/distraction” meter at the top of the screen. It was utterly campy. (Honestly what it most reminded me of was the absurd dating-sim parody in the game Undertale when you “date” the character Papyrus and get a UI with ludicrous charts and meters). Since the visual presentation was mostly default Twine here, I liked that flourish (along with the page that gradually gets populated with the stanzas you are writing) to make the piece feel more crafted and lived-in. A good use of the four hours, I think.
I thought the multiple endings were a good way to encourage replays. I originally stopped after three endings and wrote most of this response, but I was curious enough to go back and try to figure out the endings that I missed.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
There was a visual technical error when printing the final poem where two of the lines overlapped each other. So if a post-comp edit is planned, that’s a minor thing that could be touched up.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I was impressed by the meter at the top of the screen and how it actually turned out to be functional/have mechanical value in the game rather than just being a comedy device. It worked pretty well considering the limited development time. The thing that stands out to me about it, beyond the humor, is how a meter like this gives a player feedback as to how their choices are affecting the narrative beyond just cues in the text itself, and how that has potential to shape decisions when you are aware your choices are being measured like that.
Memorable Moment:
For sure, I was not expecting what happened when I poured the scalding hot tea out the window. (Not to mention the consequences of making that choice…)
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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!
You have a username after my own heart and I’m so glad you enjoyed the demo! Pleased that the choice system worked for you and glad the presentation didn’t take you out of it. As far as the stat font, I see how it can be hard to read. I have a toggle for the handwritten journal fonts in the options menu and I should be able to add one for these as well.
The horror will go harder in the full game for sure. I wasn’t sure how much would be too much in the demo and ended up cutting some concepts for game over situations or wounds due to time. I’m thinking if one character dies or is otherwise KO’d it would cause an immediate POV switch to someone else, which is something I want to experiment with in future builds…
Thank you so much for tracking down those typos (and the holdover use of Laurence’s prototype name/lich pseudonym), all of which I missed after looking at the text for way too long. It helps a lot to get more eyes on it. Another big thanks for spotting the inconsistent quotation marks. I’m near sighted and these escape me constantly. I’ll replace them next time I’m messing with things.
For now, I finally figured out that the broken images seemed to be due to itch preferring jpgs to pngs in this instance. All of these issues are now fixed!!! Thanks again for the helpful feedback!
3 | LPM | AT THE STRIKE OF TWELVE by: One Boat Crew (Raiden)
Progress:
I reached the main good ending in around 5 minutes, and spent a few more minutes checking the alternate branches.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This piece is a mix of different horror elements—psychological horror, the haunting at the grave site, and crime thriller. The narrative weaves these elements together, with the spatial anchor of the grave site to start and end the piece.
Things I Appreciated:
What I enjoyed the most about this piece is the focus on sound details. The bell motif carries through the whole piece, which helps the piece feel cohesive even as different surreal things happen over the course of the narrative. That’s not the only sound, either (for instance, the clomping of steps, rain in the protagonist’s ear).
Another element I liked was the horror element of being in the wrong body, with emphasis placed on the calloused hands that recur through a few different scenes. Having those details carry through across scenes helps them stick in the reader’s mind.
I especially liked the description of the monster in the bad ending, there were some good details that I thought worked really well together to build an image for the reader.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
In terms of presentation style, one minor note that I think is relatively easy to implement that would make this look visually cleaner, is putting an empty space/line between paragraphs. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but I personally find that if you aren’t indenting paragraphs, adding this extra line break really helps direct my eye to each sentence/paragraph, and improves how efficiently I am able to absorb the information. It seems to just make things look cleaner and more focused.
Something I observed in this piece is that, when presented with two choices, the top/first option is always the “correct” one (to advance to the main good ending). I think it’s a good strategy to, even if you structure it that way originally while drafting to help stay organized, go through and mix it up so that the reader doesn’t start to recognize the pattern as to what they should select.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I think this is the first time in a piece that I noticed how much the presentation order of the choices can matter. While I have discussed in the past how choices can be given more weight when both options seem similarly plausible (or similarly unappealing), I haven’t thought much about the psychology of how the reader’s bias might play out to select the first vs. the second choice. I think in choice based narratives, there must be a slight bias toward picking the top choice (especially when the reader is expecting to go back and try again to find other branches of the narratives), so taking that into consideration (which choice you are deciding to privilege with the first position and why) is something that I think I want to be conscious of in my own work.
Memorable Moment:
I leaned forward the most when the protagonist character woke up in the detective’s body for the first time. That’s the part that drew me the most into the narrative and made me curious as to where it would go next!
I explored several branches of this narrative (all of which, that I found, led to different types of bad endings) in around 15 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
Well. This is far and away the most disturbing thing I have read out of the 23 entries I have read thus far. The content warning for “extreme body horror” is accurate! This is a story where you play as a kind of viral infection with a consciousness that spreads itself. So it inverts the framework of an apocalyptic pandemic by playing as a malevolent entity that has no morality other than replicating itself and infecting more, as opposed to centering the perspective of human survivors as you might find more typically. One layer of the piece is the specifically gendered violence here. You play as an It, but a masculinized It, who infects and traumatizes women in particular. You start in a woman’s body, and can, depending on your choices, manipulate her social connections to target other women she is acquainted with. It feels thematically important that the “it” changes to “he” at the very end. To me, this is a huge part of why this is capital h Horror.
Things I Appreciated:
To be a bit blunt, I did not really enjoy reading this. And that’s fine! No one asked me to play every game here, I chose to do that. I figured I probably wouldn’t like it based on the content warnings alone. But, the thing I appreciate is that the piece is very effective in what it sets out to do. The disturbing imagery is well-crafted. It is disgusting, oozing, and full of personality. It elicits a strong emotional response. So I appreciate that, even though this isn’t really a piece “for me,” I think people who are into this type of extreme body horror might get a lot out of the richness and intensity of the descriptions, and the ghoulishness of the choices presented.
I was impressed with the general quality and execution of the writing given the four-hour time limit. There wasn’t a huge number of branches, but I thought that time was spent effectively to where I didn’t find branches that felt underdeveloped or under-served.
I liked the rhythm of the writing voice, the way that there is variation in sentence length such that it takes on a stream-of-consciousness quality at times (without sacrificing clarity). The repetitions and runaway clauses add an eerily melodic quality to the text even as it describes terrible things.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
Some very minor typo cleanup, if a post-comp update is planned: It’s voice is indescribable. → Its; Then think about how the batcteria → bacteria; a hanging one of these | after Restart in the run-away-from-Colleen branch; various quotation mark inconsistencies (curled vs. uncurled).
The content warnings are pretty good at communicating what’s in the piece already, but you might consider adding something along the lines of gendered violence? I’ve never been the best at developing content warnings, but given the emphasis here and the way the virus/disease calls upon the concept of consent in its thoughts about the woman/women it is infecting, it feels like something like that would add even more emphasis to what is in the piece. Like I can imagine a reader who might be more down for extreme body horror in general, but find that focus of the horror specifically a reason not to read.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
Since I don’t really read work in this genre normally (extreme body horror), I thought it was good to be exposed to an example of it as a case study in how to use imagery and writing voice/cadence to create/amplify intensity.
I also thought the branching structure of the piece, considering the 4-hour time limit, to be interesting. There were times I was surprised at how the branches fed back together based on your choices, but it made sense. I liked that there was this element of nonlinearity to the narrative. Pretty cool to see a structure like that developed on the fly.
Memorable Moment:
It’s kind of hard to condense the experience of playing this into one moment, but I think what sank in the most to me is the conversation with the immunologist where you can offer her many different rationalizations to try to convince her to side with you. It felt immersive into the morality of the character I was playing as.
You are forced to select between two very bad and ethically dubious options, and make your peace with that.
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