I read through the different choices and reached the various endings in around 15 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is an interesting one! So I view the horror here as mainly psychological (with body horror as well). And the reason I focus more on the psychological aspects is because the piece really brings to mind the anxieties of colonialism. At the outset, there is a team defined not by their names but their role in forming the “civilization”/“frontier force” that will document and claim the mysterious island, mapping their own systems of meaning onto it. But, as is often the case in pieces narrated from the perspective of a colonizing force, the island’s Indigeneity is reduced to an inhuman form. Here, the column is this ancient almost cosmic horror that undermines the very social structure that the expedition is trying to impose onto it. So to me, the piece exposes the paranoia of “civilization” toward its own fragility and disorder in the face of the unknown it has taken upon itself to supposedly bring to order. It presents the impulse to expand and map and explore just for the sake of doing so, as inherently self-destructive.
Things I Appreciated:
I was gripped by this narrative from the outset. The column is a powerful visual, and the stakes are established and escalated quickly. I liked the time mechanic of recounting the previous events day by day to arrive at the present, and finally having just enough exposition done that I had a good sense what I was choosing between and why.
Importantly, while there are only two choices, all options sound similarly (un)appealing. It is not obvious what the better choice is each time, so I really tried to think about why I was making each choice. (Unfortunately, I made poor choices and ended up dying on the first attempt, but at least I felt like I had plausible reasons for my decisions at the time.) I like when I’m legitimately torn when I face a choice, it makes the decision feel more consequential.
I thought the replay element was well-structured, sending the player back to the first decision point rather than requiring a full restart.
And just, as indicated above, I found it really thematically rich. I think because the characters are identified by their roles rather than names, it directed my attention to think of them less as characters but more as societal archetypes, which worked for me in a short narrative. Had this been a larger scale narrative, I think the emotional distance this creates between the player and the characters would have weighed on me more.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
The “flaws” in the piece are basically things that would be fleshed out further without the time limit. I’m kind of blown away by how well developed this is given those limits, it takes some serious skill to pull all that off in four hours! The first thing I want to highlight though, is the way that the linguistic tasks of the protagonist are handwaved away. We jump right to the fully translated/interpreted ritual rules, in a way that is discordant with the unsettling, alien way that the column is presented. I don’t feel that I know enough about the linguist to understand how they were able to arrive at these conclusions with such slickness. So I’d imagine, if this piece were developed later into something more, there would be more struggle between the protagonist and the meaning they are trying to render from the island.
This piece makes use of a large cast and has a conceit that is focused on social strategy and awareness. But because of the limited permutations branched out in this narrative, it feels like trying to deduce anything is more a theater of strategy and social awareness rather than feeling like that in practice. A hypothetical post-comp version that fleshes out the characters way more and gives the player the opportunity to make a wider range of choices to try to navigate the situation could be really interesting. But I do think it works as is, perhaps overly gamifying the ritual would undermine it.
One of the things I kept thinking about was what would have happened mechanically if the group had started out with an even number of people rather than an odd number. Say they start with 10. The photographer dies, leaving 9, but only 4 pairs could form, leaving one person left over, unable to perform the ritual. The stakes of being the one person left out and doomed by default would be extreme, and I feel like the player character being directly responsible for causing that one person to be un-paired is an untapped gut punch here.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I mean one thing is just like, the scope of what is possible to do in four hours, if you are fluent in the medium and have planned well. This is a great illustration of time management and control, at least as far as I can tell looking at it from the outside of the creative process that brought it into being.
An element that I want to highlight here is how the atmosphere of social paranoia is conveyed. In a short few paragraphs, we can witness different pairs or groups of people whispering to each other or accusing each other, trying to figure out who they can trust. Because of the player’s lack of deep familiarity with the characters, this is immersive because it’s hard to track who to trust or not, similar to how the characters would be feeling in-universe.
Memorable Moment:
The most enduring image is the column itself rising as the group approaches, and specifically, the faces that grow and emerge from it as the curse takes hold. “The steadfast chimney of a burned-out house” is a punchy visual for me because I’ve spent time passing through places devastated by wildfires and the surreal field of charred chimneys is the kind of thing that you don’t easily forget.
I played through a few times, taking about 15 minutes total.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
The horror element revolves around the subsumption of identity that takes place when one becomes a parent and has their priorities (willingly or not) dragged in a different direction by that situation. Personally, I found the aspect of being thrust into the role of being a parent in the first place discomfiting. Growing up, I was the youngest child in my family by a significant margin, and as a result, I was basically never around people younger than me. Now as an adult, I don’t really have any interest in becoming a parent—I honestly find the idea of it unsettling in a way that is difficult to explain. As a result, I felt primed to read into the horror angles. There’s the psychological aspect of being constantly worn down by exhaustion, creating a pressure to appease, causing you to mistakenly say/write the wrong name through sheer repetition. The social world around you pressures you to accept this new identity. You are not able to explain or rationalize with your child because of the communication gap. But you could also see it as more of a comedy piece with darker undertones. Because it is also funny—the idea of a meter calculating the percentage between Larry/Yarry is inherently absurd, and the situations have a comical edge to them.
Things I Appreciated:
As I touched on briefly above, there’s something really absurd about the Larry/Yarry meter, and just watching “Yarry” gradually overwhelm the “Larry” side, taking over your identity. Like with a previous piece that I encountered earlier (Forevermore: A Game of Writing Horror), this meter has a dual role as an absurd joke and also communicates to the player roughly what path you are on in the narrative, so it is an important part of the narrative experience.
I appreciated the child as a kind of antagonist. It’s a fascinating inversion of the adult-child power dynamic. Because Jasper is so young, you are not really able to communicate to them why you don’t want to be renamed Yarry (assuming you care either way, though as presented it feels like the protagonist doesn’t really love that), and Jasper’s ability to disrupt any situation by screaming and/or crying gives them (unknowingly) massive social leverage to influence the protagonist’s behavior. I thought it was one of those funny-but-with-an-undercurrent-of-truth kind of portrayals of how raising a child at that age could be like.
I liked the efficiency of characterization for the main family, as well as the side characters you encounter in different scenes. I felt like I was able to quickly grasp the perspective of everyone involved, which helps set the table for later in the narrative when the social pressure to become Yarry intensifies and you have to decide how Larry should respond.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
My main critique of how this piece is structured is the abruptness of the “resistance” ending, which I received the first time through. As I played, encountering the power struggle between Jasper and Larry, I tried to balance taking reasonable actions while retaining my identity where it felt safe to do that. The first ending I received felt distinctly unresolved, like it hadn’t built up to anything. I was completely caught off guard by the fact that this was the ending text, since I hadn’t really felt the narrative arc. When I played it again, and chose the “appeasement” ending of embracing the new identity, it felt much more solid to me. So I guess, if given more time than four hours to work on this piece, I think some smoothing out of the ending/structure could be warranted. Taking both endings together, the “resistance” ending does give the impression that, eventually, you will be forced to succumb to the “Yarry” identity, one way or another.
You know what, I was about to give a formatting recommendation, but I double-checked and this piece was also simultaneously submitted to the Barebones Jam, which prohibits the use of non-default formatting. So I guess, uh, there’s no real point in mentioning it since it can’t be changed . But for what it’s worth, I think adding some kind of visual flair to distinguish the final page/choice box would help to better prime the reader that the piece is ending. Because the choice box looks identical to the previous pages, and the player gets lulled into the rhythm of clicking through, it sort of obscured the other signals that this was an ending page.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I haven’t been discussing cover art much during these responses, but I want to take a moment to mention how effective it was. The choice of cropping/zoom gives the child a hint of sinister energy, and made me feel a little unsettled going into this story. This felt like an approriate mood to be in as the narrative unfolded, so job well done there.
I thought this was a great example of drawing horror out of the presumed-to-be-ordinary. Everything depicted here could actually happen. The piece’s kind of intimate focus on the family and Larry’s inner life contributes to a sense of isolation, where he feels he has no one he can turn to as a means of resolving his identity crisis. It paints a portrait of parenthood that feels both realistic and unsettling. It feels like an invitation to examine what in my own life could be reframed as a quotidian horror.
Memorable Moment:
When it turned out that Larry had been so subconsciously influenced that he had told the barista that his name was “Yarry,” without realizing it at the time.
I spent 50 minutes here, with most of that time spent navigating the green section (Tillie).
Engagement with Horror Genre:
I would describe this primarily as experimental horror. This is utterly unlike anything else that I have read and corrodes the edges of what it means to be a narrative. As a result, I found the most meaning in the emotions and anxieties that I felt while navigating the piece, so the horror here was mostly psychological, and I have to say, pretty effective from the mindset of causing me to question myself and my motivations while playing.
Spilling My Gut:
In light of the piece’s unique presentation, I decided to amend my response structure to just… describe what happened as a narrative, and what I think about what those experiences.
First, I jump into the story, which seems to assume some prior knowledge about the previous games. It literally says, “You know the story.” I don’t! But I thought, eh, I’ll probably get the gist of it as I go along. The game presents a choice of four characters to follow, along with instructions to start with Gemma. This was intriguing to me, because being presented a choice but being told to choose something in particular is a kind of a challenge to the player’s willingness to obey or disobey instructions. Why present a choice if there is a specific way to do it? That signals that following or not following instructions is itself important to the experience. I decided to start by picking Gemma, as instructed, and see how that went.
GEMMA: This character answers the phone, where a mysterious voice tells her to not open the red door until instructed to do so. I felt like the theme of player agency/game authority was continuing here, so I followed along and started clicking through the white doors, which lead downward. After a while, I started to have an ominous feeling, wondering how far away from the red door I was going to get. It became harder and harder to absorb the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the text as my own stream-of-consciousness grew more and more dominant. To click to the next screen takes a not-insignificant amount of time, so the further I got, the more that anxiety grew. It can’t be infinite, right? There was a four hour time limit on writing. It actually does have to end, eventually. Right? How much could someone possibly write in four hours? (I actually went back and checked to make sure this wasn’t an entry for Le Grand Guignol.) But no, it keeps being new unique text. It will end. I started to grow resentful of the voice on the phone. What are you waiting for? I felt a bit of shame. Why am I mindlessly bowing to authority here? I noticed a theme about player agency vs. game authority, do I not trust myself to understand the theme well enough to know that I should resist the instructions? So I decided I wasn’t going to go to the end, wherever it is. I will decide for myself that I’ve seen enough of this column of perception. I began the long process of pulling back all the threads of Gemma’s thoughts and anxiety that I had unspooled, at long last ascending to the red door, at which point, the UI slowly descended until I was left staring at a blank red screen, with the ghostly after-images of wrong-color floating in my eyes around the edges of the red box when I moved my head. I wasn’t sure what to do from here, but I thought, it’s fine, I’ve already broken the “rules” by disobeying the phone call, so I just refreshed the page.
UMA: This one worked a bit differently. Instead of a phone call, I signed a suspicious contract to not open the blue door. I was dropped into a kind of compass grid version of the previous UI that includes horizontal, along with vertical motion. I considered opening the blue door immediately, but there was text to read! What do you mean, I’d just not try reading the text? In this economy? But this temptation proved foolish. With the maze-like construction, I quickly found myself lost in a sea of copies of “I am scared,” unable to find my way back to the blue door and becoming suddenly very paranoid that the navigation was in some way cyclical or noneuclidean. Applying what I learned from Gemma’s section, I escaped by refreshing the page and this time, immediately opened the blue door, causing me to get stuck on a blue version of the blank screen after the UI slowly drifted away. So I refreshed again to try the third section.
TILLIE: This section is by far the most complex to navigate, adding a third dimension entirely with an elevator that you can travel up. I spent a very long time lost on the first floor, unable to find my way back among the sea of “I am tired” screens, and you know what, I was getting tired. That was immersive. A lot of the narrative in this section seemed to be about resisting the call to work for the sake of working*,* and the exhaustion that entails. But I was like, well, there’s a green door somewhere, and I’m going to find it. After finally clawing my way back to the elevator, I decided to try finding the top floor. And it just kept going. As I went, I decided to check if the floors maxed out at two digits, and if a third digit appeared, I would turn back. Well, a long while later, staring at the scintillating inversions of green and black I was faced with, I reached floor 100, and wouldn’t you know it, “I am tired.” So I went back down, and resolved to explore whatever the highest floor I could find that seemed to have custom text. At this point, I had come to a growing acceptance that there wasn’t going to be a green door. Why would there be? The entire section—echoing previous characters—felt like it was about resisting that call to strive for someone else when it isn’t really worth it. And yet… I just had this feeling. It’s a bit pathetic, but I’ve decided I’m just going to say it anyway: I had this intrusive thought that if I don’t find the green door but it was actually possible, people were going to be disappointed in me, and my response to the game. And that gnawed at me. It really did. That feeling of shame that, if the green door existed and I didn’t find it, the users of intfiction.org will be let down by the fact that I inaccurately claimed that the whole point is that there isn’t a green door. I’d be such a flop! Are you emotionally prepared for that? Flopping? (It’s already happened. Countless times.) So, I stopped before finding it. And even now, I’m like… Can I trust my instinct enough that there wasn’t actually a green door? It’s totally there somewhere, isn’t it? I said to myself (this is a dramatization, to be clear), essentially, “DemonApologist, sweetie, this is a forum post. On a forum you’ve been on for like 2 months. For people you barely know. Maybe at most, like 10 people will read this. It’s completely normal and fine to not find the green door, even if it exists. Instead of mindlessly clicking for a green door, you could be doing other productive and meaningful things, like reading gay Baldur’s Gate 3 fan-fiction. What is Raphael up to these days?” Then, I refreshed the page.
STACE: In this section, I unfolded the cosmos and reality itself by eating chips.
Memorable Moment:
I would say that this entry as a whole was a unique and memorable experience, that was successful in picking at my anxieties in terms of playing a game specifically so that I can talk about it for other people to read. There was a quote that really stood out to me: “I know this is the age of reading comprehension.” Well, I leave that to you, now. Good luck parsing through whatever the hell it is that I wrote in the above sections.
I decided to play for about 14 minutes, before—as the game instructs—making my own ending by quitting.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
I’d describe this as gender horror, or perhaps, intimate relationship horror. Everything is stripped back except the dynamic between the player and the admirer, and as a result the two are drawn uncomfortably close together. The horror is in seeing a taste of real-life abuser manipulation tactics; and more so if you recognize any from personal experience. There is also a meta horror aspect, where the admirer tries to break the fourth wall to make the player feel more vulnerable. And body horror too, with the descriptions of how the admirer essentially wants to consume you from the inside out.
Things I Appreciated:
This was a fascinating parser game experience. I was so thrown off by being greeted with “hello” and the indication to take a conversational approach. This scrambled the default way I might engage with a parser game and forced me to develop a way of interacting with the game that was unique to this game. It’s probably the slowest that I’ve entered commands, taking a lot of time to really think about what I should do and why. At first, I tried asking questions to the admirer, but then I switched over to trying to use a parser style approach (e.g., things like, “bring admirer closer” or “talk about space”), and then switched back to the conversational approach when prompted to do that. I think it’s really interesting to see a parser game developed in 4 hours, I’m impressed that it works as well as it does.
So the game feels straightforwardly about leaving an abusive relationship. I don’t really think I have to explain why? It’s not really a metaphor (except in the sense of like, a ghost or spirit possessing you like a possessive partner or stalker might), it’s just the actual text of what’s happening here. The role of player agency is especially important, I think. The game instructs you that you can quit at any time. But the admirer to some extent (with the game mechanics as a proxy for their power), is able to keep you from leaving for a while with their responses. (At least for me. I stayed in the game for 14 minutes). So it plays with that—the game emulating the kind of abuse tactic where you are made to feel guilty for staying when you could leave at any time, which turns around to be a reason you “deserve” further abuse.
I really liked the verbal tic of repetition that is used here to characterize the admirer’s voice. (For instance: “Who, who, who. I don’t know.” or “I try try try to be close”) This specificity makes the voice feel slightly alien, but also dynamic, and rhythmic. I thought it was impressive to tease that kind of characterization out given the 4 hour time limit.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
An element that I want to discuss is the meta aspect: for instance, the admirer mentioning that their words are on my screen, or the end text saying “See you tonight. And tomorrow. Everywhere. Always.” I feel like this is a gesture to spook the player by reaching through the fourth wall, so to speak. That element didn’t really feel threatening to me, necessarily. The reason I think it didn’t fully work for me is a bit difficult to describe, but I will do my best. So, as I started, the experience this felt most similar to was, a few years ago (2020 or 2021, maybe?) when I first spoke to a relatively responsive chatbot. Mainly, I was curious about it and wanted to see what the experience was like. It felt particularly uncanny to me because of the power dynamic between the human user and the bot. I could not help but impose a kind of emotional agency onto the bot, even when it stumbled and made errors in conversation that a human respondent is not likely to make. But it does not have the true ability to decide what it can process and say as a consciousness. So the beginning of the piece put me in that mindset—I felt very conscious that I held the power in the relationship with the game. The reason I quit when I did is that I felt like I was toying with the admirer—like, I worried about how it would feel to be essentially trying to torment all possible text responses out of this entity, who has no agency to say anything except what the author of the game has dictated that they are able to say, as prompted by me. Weird, right? So all in all, this isn’t like a big criticism or something, I just wanted to describe this. It gave me a particularly melancholy feeling, I guess, to notice in myself a desire to connect with or at least understand even an entity that in-universe, is objectively abusive and terrible, but whose lack of consciousness/awareness (being a scripted program) made me feel like I was the one propagating a toxic power dynamic by hoping to extract meaning from it. It’s not exactly atypical to have mixed feelings about an abuser, but this feels like an unusual iteration of that. (Sorry, it just seems like I keep having Big Weird Feelings™ throughout all of EctoComp )
It can’t be helped due to the time limit for implementation, but basically, when the responses hit, they really hit. But when you get a repeated message that doesn’t quite make sense for what you asked (or something that feels explicitly like gameplay instructions in an out-of-character voice), it does mildly disrupt the immersion of the piece. But I am still super impressed by how much is there that the game was able to signal to me to talk about!
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I have never seen this kind of chatbot-esque conversational format in a parser game before. I had no idea something like this was even possible. It was so disruptive to the approach I took to playing it because of how unique it was! Though I have not tried writing anything close to a parser game, I really love the experimental aspect of it and pushing the limits of what the software and dialogue response can be used to do mechanically and narratively.
As I discussed above, in this case where things are tightly focused on a single character relationship, specificity of voice is very important, and I feel like that was honed in on in a powerful way. There is a familiarity and realism to the abuse tactics on display, at the same time that the alienness of the entity cuts across it with a different layer of monstrosity to build something unique/distinctive.
Memorable Moment:
The moments where the admirer “slips up” and reveals, then tries to distract or obscure, their intentions. For instance: “I want to speak like you. Speak for you. I want to be you.”
9 | LPM | YOUR LITTLE HAUNTING by: Christina Nordlander
Progress:
I reached an ending in about 8 minutes of play. The ending I got was I electrocuted myself by trying to take wires out of the fusebox and became a ghost haunting the house.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This takes a classic horror setting—a creepy, dark haunted house—with a light twist. The twist being, that the protagonist becomes the source of the haunting. So it plays with your expectations a bit—the default assumption is that you would find an already haunted house, but it’s a story of the haunting of a house. Pretty cool, I think!
Things I Appreciated:
Because of the four-hour time limit, there are a lot of under or unimplemented items. That’s inevitable. But I want to highlight a really clever way that this actually is used in the piece’s favor. After my character got electrocuted, and I saw the glowing human figure, I immediately tried to examine it and interact with it, and couldn’t. That was an uncanny, unsettling moment. Because the game has acknowledged its presence, but has not given me the agency to learn more about it. It made me feel slightly spooked because I realized the parser implementation was not going to let me have much say in what happened next. I actually think if being able to examine the ghost resulted in a response, it would have been slightly less spooky. Weird, that!
I thought it was fascinating that this game weaponizes parser player behavior to advance the narrative. As silly as it sounds, I was absolutely tempted by the wires in the fusebox, especially with the emphasis in the description of how shiny and exposed they were. Did I have any need for wires? Any puzzle that I thought I was going to solve with them? No. All I saw was a parser game element that could theoretically be used later, and went for it. The curiosity, or recklessness, or resourcefulness of the player is drawn upon to create the ending. The author is counting on that, and made it work despite having so little time to develop the game.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
This again comes down to development time, but I found that there’s a kind of illogic to the protagonist behavior based on the implementation. The goal of the player is to find light, so that animated my choices here. When entering the kitchen, I saw that there was an electric lantern providing light from outside the window. I tried opening the window (to reach through and take it) and when that was impossible, I tried going outside to walk around the side of the house to get to the lantern, which was also disallowed. The lantern seemed like it would be incredibly important because of the priority it has in description (one of the first things I encountered), but my attempts to interact with it were stymied. (This is the kind of thing that would undoubtedly be fleshed out more without the 4-hour time limit).
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I’m impressed by the development! Parser coding seems so alien and difficult to me looking at it from the outside, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this was done in the 4-hour time limit, considering that it does what it needs to do to get the protagonist wandering around enough to trigger the narrative to escalate.
Something I thought a lot about was the importance of specificity and distinctiveness in writing. The time in the game is spent exploring what is, essentially, your statistically average haunted house. Yet, there are still some glimpses of interesting description and intrigue in the plot that it doesn’t ultimately come across as generic. I like seeing how authors are able to maintain a sense of that specificity, when the time pressure might in theory work against the cognitive burden of coming up with something fresh to say.
Memorable Moment:
For sure, it was when I blithely sidestepped common sense to take the wires. I really shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was.
I spent around 10 minutes with this piece, reading through various branches/options that are presented (I think I went through three total times).
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is a piece that uses the supernatural element of dying every single day as a way to explore the body horror and psychological aspects of living with disability/chronic illness without a way to access the kind of social support/resources that might help with this situation. So, it’s less the supernatural element, and more the realism of the plot, that makes this function as a horror piece.
Things I Appreciated:
The choices in this piece felt punishing and consequential. Broadly, I felt that there were a few different themes across the options presented. There were the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” options where you let the financial and social pressure to do things “the normal way” prevail (such as: keep working the rest of your shift even when it’s abundantly clear that it is unhealthy to do so), usually causing yourself extensive physical and mental harm in the process. There were options that involved disengaging entirely, like canceling social plans and taking off an entire week of work. Some of the options involve blatantly spending money in a way that is unsustainable (like ordering out for dinner yet again). And finally, there is a set of options that are unattractive but necessary compromises, like asking Anna to visit you at home rather than going to the museum, so that you can retain a social life. Seeing all these themes laid out, it paints a dark portrait, but the path of realistic compromise and not capitulating to the pressure to push yourself to extremes or withdraw entirely offers the most optimistic ending, I think.
This piece navigates shame and stigma using its supernatural conceit. It feels impossible to explain to people what is happening, and displaying signs of physical illness in public is socially taboo in a way that makes it feel essential to hide it as much as possible. A moment where this comes up is in deciding how to make the bathroom more comfortable to help manage the postmortem cleanup, where it becomes important to be able to stow it away given that your social world revolves increasingly on having friends visit your home.
Something I note as a really important element too is the inconsistency of the deaths. Since each one happens differently and start at variable times throughout the day, efforts to plan things in advance are stymied by the unpredictability of it. In this way, the death loop syndrome is pervasive, casting a shadow over parts of the day where it “hasn’t happened yet” (and that time is spent recovering from the previous bout as it is). The rigid structure of “productive” time, with its alarms and calendars and deadlines, has no concept of the pulsing, fluid temporality of illness.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
Overall, this is well presented, emotionally resonant, well-edited, has interesting and consequential choices, and is cohesive. A lot to have accomplished in just four hours! But, there is one gameplay/interactive element that I thought didn’t always line up with the others. When presented with options related to money, I didn’t feel the weight of the choices as heavily because of the deferral of long term consequences beyond the scope of the game. I felt the weight of the worry—the understanding that the character has that those choices are financially unsustainable, which is realistic—but I also felt aware that since I had no concept of the budget that I was spending of someone else’s money, and the money spent doesn’t appear to be actively tracked by the game to come up in the ending, it felt like this aspect didn’t pack as much of a punch as the social and physical consequences of other choices did on the ending. So, if there were a post-comp release or more development done on this game, I think making the financial consequences of throwing money at things to get through the roughest days more palpable would be an aspect to examine.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This was a great example of presenting choices that are, in this case, roughly similar in how unappealing they are, creating pressure for the reader/player to evaluate those options. While I did have preferences in how to approach things and chose accordingly, each choice has noticeable downsides that the player has to contend with. There’s no magical answer to the situation that will feel completely fulfilling. The choices felt like choices, and even the evidently bad options felt realistic because they are so reminiscent of the temptation of real life choices that feel good only in the immediate short term and worse later.
Memorable Moment:
It was the first ending I got, where the player character’s friendship with Anna has developed further and it provides a much-needed hope amidst what is otherwise a misery simulator. It’s not hope in an unrealistically idealized sense, but a grounded hope that feels more healing because of its groundedness, I thought.
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:
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
I reached an ending in around one minute and twenty seconds. Is the length of the game a spoiler in this case? I guess I’ll tag it. Anyway, I actually tried replaying this game to see if there were any alternate endings or something, but since the game remembered my progress, it wasn’t feasible to restart it as I just returned to the final screen.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This was camp. It’s a short comedy-horror piece making fun of a few horror tropes, namely the titular jumpscare. It’s cheap, but effective. You know it’s happening, you have a good idea how it’s going to happen, and for those 80 seconds, I still felt tense about clicking on every link that I did until it happened.
Things I Appreciated:
Despite its brevity, I laughed multiple times while playing, so it really makes those few lines of text count. Even the front matter is funny. “It’s pronounced ‘Jump-scar-ay’” made me laugh days before I actually played this, when I would see it while scrolling through to find the next game the randomizer had picked out for me.
I thought the presentation was clever: as I was playing, my mind was racing as to how the jumpscare would work. Would it be one of the links that I clicked on? Or was it on a timer? I felt compelled to keep clicking through, on the verge of distraction by mapping the passageways in case that somehow mattered, while still kind of feeling like I was trying to run away from my fate. It’s a pithy experience.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
I mean what is there to say, really? There could’ve been more jumpscares? It’s “Jumpscare Manor,” not “Jumpscares Manor.”
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
There’s something fascinating to me about the restraint of the jumpscare. Actually getting jumpscared can be a pretty unpleasant experience, especially if you truly aren’t expecting it. This piece sets the table with its framing to create a safe enough space to actually enjoy a jumpscare, but in a way that also undercuts its intensity. It’s loud, but not excessively so. It doesn’t take up the entire screen. It’s essentially, an amuse bouche of jumpscare. (Oh my god. I suddenly, just now, had a massive bout of paranoia because, while writing this response, I had left the game open to the ending screen. The description of the game says it “contains jumpscares,” plural! What if there is a SECOND jumpscare from that “final” screen, on a longer timer?? I rushed to close that tab just in case. See, this is why jumpscares create trust issues!)
Memorable Moment:
I realize this is a bit basic, but… getting jumpscared. That’s the reason we’re all here.
Thanks, I let a lot of things wait until late, because I had a case of the why-bothers despite having most puzzles in place … which accounts for a lot of the bugs you found that I need to fix.
As for the memorable moment, yeah, it was a sort of elephant in a room once I saw it. I want to address that sort of thing when I can, because certainly when I was ten or so, it got a lot of laughs, and we want to do better. I don’t want to be too preachy about it, and it’s something others unfortunately have more experience with me, but it’s personal to me to be on the other end of that as well.
Sorry about having desperation set in there, and yes, I’d like a way to progressively hint the first puzzle! That’s high priority for post-comp.
The initial bug you found with EYE was a regression due to a namespace collision (room name SickSeat, scenery Sick Seat, and I defined eye-number of Sick Seat twice when I made scenery as well as a room, and I thought I had a test case in but didn’t). That’s fixed now.
I decided to read through this piece three times, hoping to absorb as much as I could from it. That took a total of around 17 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
I don’t really see this as a horror piece, rather, it’s more like an autumnal/Halloween-themed literary piece about memory, and how it is filtered by both nostalgia and loss.
Things I Appreciated:
I feel this is a more open-ended piece. It’s very well written, pithy with its use of space on each page. In rereading it multiple times, I challenged myself to think about what motifs, emotions, or themes rose to the surface. Here is some rambling discussion of a few things stood out to me. First, the anchoring of time and place, with the cottonwood tree at the edge of the maze, and the repeated date (Oct. 30th) providing the grounding for what is happening. Somewhat unusually, we start from the contemporary year (2024) and flow backward, a few years at a time. As the narrator takes us further and further back in memory, I had a sensation of how those memories fragmented, feathering into a kind of fractal, wisping around the edges of the big loss of her mother that is outlined but not described. The feeling of the memory of the castle is placed alongside the camera recordings that show something different, but we see that the camera has its gaps and inconsistencies too—unable to see, for instance, into the car ride. In the 2024 entry, the narrator is still insistent upon using her phone to hold onto what she can of this tree’s image. There is a focus on sight, or being seen, as well as on sound, and waiting. I feel pain in the gaps, the things not fully recalled, that nevertheless haunt the narrative (like whatever it was that Dakota said, which one could infer but perhaps never truly know while reading this).
The imagery and autumnal vibes are pretty evocative here. The best way I can think of to describe it is, it embodies the October-30th-ness of October 30th. The atmosphere is something beautiful but slightly foreboding, like a hug that feels colder than you expect it to.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
Interestingly, this is not a choice-based narrative. Really, the interactive element is the presentation, the blocking of sentences on each card/page, guiding the reader’s attention to certain moments. It contributes to a sensation of guardedness between the narrator and reader, keeping the reader (at least, as I experienced) at a slight distance, which seems to mirror the guarded way the narrator talks around the edges of some of the memories.
I know this was impossible due to the requirements for the (simultaneously entered) Bare-Bones Jam, but the background/cover art is so evocative and beautiful that I wish it had been incorporated into the visual presentation of the story. I found that I missed it after clicking through to play and it was gone.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I think this is a good example of how to use IF in the format of a short story. Like it’s a good reminder that a piece can have these interactive elements and control over the visual presentation, without being choice-based or having to be in second-person, for instance.
I found the portrayal of the narrator’s voice interesting as the time grew further and further in the past—we are not seeing how they would have thought about what they were experiencing at the time, rather, we are seeing those events recalled and reflected upon by the contemporary version of the narrator, diverging further and further from the past version of themselves.
Memorable Moment:
The moment that sticks out the most in my mind is the recognition that hearing her mother’s voice in the recording was more powerful than the visuals. It reminded me of my own experience, of how a loved one’s answering machine message—perhaps something that is disappearing as a medium, I suppose—gained new significance after their death as a way to hear them again.
This was a pretty light-hearted Halloween-themed piece, with a supernatural element (the ghosts). The situation is more humorous than threatening.
Things I Appreciated:
My favorite aspect of the game was the upstairs puzzle involving the hat. It was interesting to have two NPCs to talk to at once and try to figure out if there was a more diplomatic way of getting the hat before just snatching it. It was a very functional puzzle given the limited development time, and I found it fun!
I like the premise of the game, it seems like it could be iterated on for a larger scale game with more ghosts, if the author were so inclined. Not that it has to be some massive undertaking, but exploring more rooms of the house and experiencing simple puzzles with slightly different types of haunting or poltergeist activity would be charming.
I thought the game was really effective in directing my action so that I didn’t use unimplemented verbs. I think the only thing I tried that didn’t work was “ask effie about hat” which the game anticipated and got me back on track immediately. So I appreciated how the descriptions and prompts from characters efficiently aimed me toward what was important for me to be looking at and doing in the game.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
I thought the path to get to the upstairs ghosts was a bit odd. It was somewhat jarring to pass through two rooms in a row with nothing in them to get there, but then arriving at a room with a lot going on. Given more development time, I’d imagine this would be evened out: maybe streamlining the path to upstairs in the description of the action, or adding some flavor text for the interstitial rooms to help with visualizing the festive Halloween decorations.
I found the interface a bit distracting. Not aesthetically, I liked the color scheme and so forth! But, at first, the game surprised me by automatically launching in fullscreen, and I accidentally clicked through some of the introductory text, which disappeared, while I was trying to undo that. (I really shouldn’t have been surprised, though, since the auto-fullscreen thing also happened in Turn Right as well! This time it’s on me.) I also experienced some mild friction here when the game gave me a feeling of ambiguity as to whether clicking something or typing a letter would suddenly cause what I’m currently reading to disappear. The source of the friction I think is my internal distraction— I’m trying to tell myself to still my fidgety fingers until I’m sure that I’m done with whatever it is that I’m reading, instead of being able to just trust that what I’m reading will continue to be there even if I mistakenly start typing a command before I’m supposed to.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I keep saying this, but it’s really impressive to me that people have coded functional parser games in four hours and under. This game has one short, and one slightly longer puzzle, multiple rooms, some dialogue, and character descriptions, and it did what it needed to do to point me through. So I just like thinking about how cool it is that people have become fluent enough in the coding languages that make this possible! It makes me feel like, if I want to learn any of them, aiming to make a small-scale parser game that takes place in only 1-3 rooms is a more achievable goal than I thought (though not in less than four hours at this point, of course).
Memorable Moment:
I really liked the moment when I had to decide to be a little rude and snatch the hat. Maybe a more polite solution is available, but I thought it was funny that the game managed to use my inhibitions against me, to make me question whether the obvious solution would really work.
This isn’t really a horror piece—it’s going for the “sweet supernatural” sub-theme, and does that effectively. A friendly creature—Narthex—helps hype you up and guide you to a party, where they then are able to grow and transform.
Things I Appreciated:
I thought the presentation of this was charming. I quite enjoyed the illustrations, and the well-tuned gray and blue color palette. It looks very polished despite the time limit.
It was an interesting choice to have the text part of the story told entirely through dialogue, I thought that it helped establish the character of Narthex quickly and effectively.
I also thought it was interesting to parallel Narthex’s emergence/transformation with the player’s social emergence/growth of confidence in attending the party. These aspects of the narrative work in harmony with each other.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
A minor note on the audio—clicking the “stats” button caused the music to stop playing while I was still listening to it. I think it could’ve continued to play through that popup screen, and only stopped (1) naturally at the conclusion of the song, and/or (2) when the player chooses to replay the game.
It would be really cool to see more story told with either this character, and/or in this presentation style! That’s beyond the scope of the 4-hour time limit of course, but I really liked the overall look and vibe of it.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
This was another example of the Moiki engine, and while I don’t know the specifics of how that works, it looks like it was great for creating something sharp/stylish and incorporating images. So it seems like it would be a good tool to tell short stories like this that have audiovisual element, based on what I’ve seen of it so far.
Memorable Moment:
I liked the moment of suspense when you can see that Narthex’s horns are growing in, and you are not yet sure what they are going to grow into.
As you might have guessed, I did plan a third ghost (hence the empty rooms) but ran out of time on the clock. I’m hoping to make a post-comp version with more ghosts added in.
Auto-fullscreen: I’m guessing you worked this out, but just press Esc to get back to the browser frame when an Itch game does this.
Text clearing: this is just the way Adventuron games work, I’m afraid! Most of the time there’ll be a tell (yellow flashing box unless the author has replaced the default graphic) to indicate it’s a ‘press enter or click the mouse’ situation and you’ll likely be clearing the screen when you do so.
And thanks very much for your transcript! It’ll be useful for my post-comp fiddling
I read through to both endings in about 8 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is a sci fi horror piece that focuses on the isolation and loneliness of distant space travel, and how that might affect someone’s mental state. There is also a significant body horror component regarding the infestation of alien worms that occurs.
Things I Appreciated:
I thought this was a really interesting snapshot of a character’s mindset. When I reached the choice point between the endings, it felt correct—or rather, natural to the character—to embrace and accept the parasites. The tone of the piece is reassuring, even as it describes grotesque physiological changes that occur as a result of the infection. What it reminded me the most of, honestly, is the appeal of cults? To take someone isolated, and offer them a sense of purpose, and convince them that it is a good thing to become part of something greater than themselves. I felt like the parasites use those manipulation tactics in a way that aligns with the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious desires revealed throughout the piece.
I liked the use of font to distinguish between the protagonist and the voice of the worms. And further, how the perspective of the worms gradually grows, taking over the narrative completely (emphasizing how they have taken over the protagonist’s body and mind)
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
Something odd happens when you click on the second star—a page of text flickers before disappearing to be replaced with something else. This seems like an error, in the sense that there isn’t enough time in that fraction of a second to actually read whatever is on that page (it looks glitchy). But it could also not be a mistake, and be some kind of subliminal imagery to help disorient the reader, given what the narrative is about.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
A detail that I liked here were the large, clickable stars that appear on their own on certain pages. I think in general, symbols/unicode are underutilized in text pieces, but it’s a great way to add some character to the narrative, as happened here.
Memorable Moment:
The eerily beautiful description of the worms, “They hang suspended from silver threads on the ceiling. They have light silvery bodies, faintly luminescent, like stars.” It gives the impression of something otherworldly, silkworms that have spun up the matter of the universe, visions that have a spiritual quality to pull the protagonist in deeper to their worm-cult.
I reached the end of the narrative in about 9 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
I didn’t necessarily see this as a horror piece—it was more of an action thriller. Though, I do feel like “revenge of the animals” is a horror-ish theme. Something like the film 28 Days Later comes to mind, where mistreated chimpanzees are the source of the pandemic virus. There are also the kaiju-like elements here with the giant squid and t-rex, and honestly even the whale which I’m just realizing might as well be a real-life kaiju creature. I mean this is certainly something that would be horrifying if it actually happened in real life, to be fair.
Things I Appreciated:
I loved the pacing of this. You could imagine a version of this where, given more than four hours, the beginning gets weighed down by a lot of the worldbuilding explaining the situation we’re in. Instead, the reader is thrown right into the action, and it keeps up its intensity the entire way through, moving from scene to scene as we face bigger and bigger threats and tougher decisions before arriving at the end. The piece is just crackling with energy and enthusiasm.
I liked the variety of animals and encounters. You might think seagulls are unthreatening (I mean, unless you’ve ever tried to eat lunch at the ocean in a tourist area, and the person with you FOR SOME REASON intentionally feeds one even though you begged them not to and then they were somehow still surprised by what happened next) but the idea of countless birds organizing to smash into and overwhelm a plane is great imagery.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
I did feel that many of the choices were relatively inconsequential. I didn’t mind this too much, given the four-hour time limit posing restricting the branching, and also how even having not-so-consequential choices so frequently still helped to immerse me in the action. The ones I had a bit more of an issue with were choices where it was choosing between pulling a lever or leaning in a certain direction where I felt like there wasn’t enough information/context to develop a good strategy of what to pick or why. Still, the randomness of these choices didn’t seem overly punishing, as far as I could tell.
I did notice some scattered typos here and there, which could be cleaned up if a post-comp revision is planned.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
I really enjoyed the presentation style and how the narrative unfolded. (If I’m not mistaken, this is developed using the Ink one?) I like the sensation it creates that you are building the narrative and how the choices feel like they are propelling you through the story because of the layout. It makes me feel like this type of action/thriller story is especially suited to this program because of how kinetic and fluid it feels. I think that’s something important to consider—even if you are more comfortable with a certain program to develop in than others, to at least run through a mental checklist of the different options in case there’s a program that seems especially suited to the type of story that you are telling. This is an example of a story that feels like it was in great harmony with the program used to develop it.
Memorable Moment:
As mentioned above, when the plane the protagonist was in got completely overwhelmed with birds and they had to eject due to the damage. For some reason I found that to be one of the most threatening scenes, imagining having to eject into a massive horde of violent birds and try to float slowly down to safety while they swarmed.
I reached the end and replayed to check some of the other choices, spending about 8 minutes with this piece.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is Lovecraftian horror, in a very direct sense given the inspiration, which overlaps with cosmic horror. The themes here focus on the danger of knowledge that has gone “too far,” its ability to corrode the spirit of those exposed to it. The dream-ocean is a powerful image here, the protagonist helpless but to descend further once they chose to open their mind to it. There’s also the sense of viral spread of the knowledge, that the doomed professor who wrote the manuscripts cannot help but pass it along to the next person, who can then spread it further.
Things I Appreciated:
I really liked the visual presentation and atmosphere of the piece. I thought the descent through the ocean was especially vivid. I pulled out the line, “No, this is a sickly green; the colour of old mould and stagnant pools should foxfire dance upon it.” I haven’t read “The Call of Cthulhu” (how terribly un-literary of me, I know. EctoComp has really been exposing my literary knowledge gaps ) but I have played Bloodborne and it honestly brought me right back to the mood of entering the fishing hamlet through the clocktower for the first time.
I enjoyed the buildup of the piece, with the earthquake aftershocks and the sudden slippage into a dream state, and the inexorable plunge downwards. I was drawn into the mood and stakes of the story quickly, and I definitely would’ve wanted to keep exploring this world further if the narrative had been longer.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
I have two central issues, both of which feel like the result of the 4-hour time limit. The first is that the choices do not appear to have an effect on the narrative at all. Even the very final choice as to whether to wake to sanity or madness seemed like it didn’t influence much. I played through first from the perspective of someone naively enthusiastic (I mean sure, those other people were cursed by forbidden knowledge, but I’m different—I can change Cthulhu!) and second from the perspective of someone who is actively trying to avoid it. Now, perhaps there is something thematically interesting about the choices not mattering—in a tale of cosmic horror, what, precisely does the individual will of one person matter in the face of infinite, seething knowledge? Does simply coming into contact with corruptive knowledge corrupt (the illusion of) agency as well? Even so, I think some more branch-specific flavor text would help flesh out the narrative a bit more.
The second thing is just that I felt like it ended too quickly, like there was more narrative to tell here. The descent through the dream-ocean was really engaging to me so when it came to an end as it did, I was just like, wow, I wish they had more than four hours to work on this so I could’ve read more! Selfish, I know.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
Encountering more ChoiceScript games (having never used it) is helping me indirectly learn more about it. For instance, all of those games that I’ve encountered have some sort of “stats” being tracked, whether it’s in the form of a meter, or here, where it descriptively tracks the state of your mind and body. It seems like this must be something built directly into the game engine. It does make me more curious about how that works. Something I think is interesting as a development note here is the decision to display the stats to the reader automatically (like Forevermore and YARRY did) vs. making them available to the reader if they click through, but otherwise not emphasize them, as happened here. In this case, I think it makes sense not to have the stats constantly on-screen as they aren’t important as a game mechanic and might be more distracting from the immersion of the piece, where the other two games seemed to use the meter’s responsiveness to choices a way of influencing player behavior. So it raises a few interrelated design questions: (1) should stats be included; (2) should stats be accessible to the player during and/or after the game; (3) should changes in stats be made visible and emphasized to the player.
Memorable Moment:
Waking up on the raft was a big surprise, and it kind of represents the tipping point (I guess… literally, since the raft also tipped over ) where the “supernatural” overtakes the “natural” in the narrative.
By process of elimination, you could deduce that You Promise is the final game on my randomized list of the anglophone La Petite Mort entries. The end is in sight!
I played through multiple times, reaching what I think are all the endings in about 12 minutes or so.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
This is an example of a Faustian bargain, where the protagonist, in desperation, decides to reach out to a fey entity in order to get what they want. Here, the Honored Guest is paying close attention to the exact wording of what you say, interpreting the bargain in a legalistic way that benefits it. There are a few things that stand out to me from this game’s version of the trope. First, the protagonist enters the arrangement with some savviness. They mention that they shouldn’t give away their name, as a cue to the player to be very careful about what to say. Second, something I like is the kind of implied revelation that a Faustian bargain is made between entities with vast inequality of power and stakes. If the Honored Guest makes a bad deal, it is just having a tough day but can try again endlessly with different desperate people. If the Esteemed Host makes a bad deal, they lose everything. Notice that the Honored Guest has usurped full power of interpretation of the bargain, becoming lawyer and judge/jury simultaneously, eroding the boundary between party and judge. One could imagine a situation where the protagonist had access to an equally competent fey lawyer, putting this case indefinitely in dispute at faerie court and creating all kinds of new problems for everyone involved. Like in real life, unequal access to quality legal representation is an enduring source of injustice in the supposedly “fair” and “objective” realm of the law. Narratives about Faustian bargains are great at revealing that.
Things I Appreciated:
Ending spoiler: The fade effect in the bad endings is fantastic. I gasped dramatically the first time it happened to me. It is genuinely surprising and fitting, and works very well to emphasize the emotional gut punch of a bad bargain to the reader.
One of the favorite things that happened here is the inversion of a structural trope in choice-based narrative. When I first got to a screen where I was choosing between three options (the million dollars vs. two versions of the lottery numbers), I was like, these are all basically the same thing, this choice isn’t very interesting. But as it turns out, being “basically the same thing” is not the same thing whatsoever if you are interpreting the statements through an incredibly granular and malicious lens, as the Honored Guest does, these minor-appearing differences are hugely consequential. If we think of choices in choice-based games across two axes—how consequential they appear at first, and how consequential they really are—this game is an example in an unusual quadrant where choices look inconsequential but really are. I really enjoyed that (belated) realization when I played through multiple times and saw what the game was doing. So cool!
More ending spoilers: After receiving several bad endings, I thought the game had only bad endings, until I reached a scene where the second symbol on the briefcase clicked into place. That gave me the sudden realization that a good (or at least, less bad) ending was going to be possible. It turned the first symbol on the briefcase from a curious detail into a sudden symbol of hope that, wait, the Esteemed Host might actually get away with this?! So I like that the game held multiple revelations, making replays worthwhile.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
Oh no! It’s ending spoilers again! As a minor note, when I reached the good ending, I was not able to restart to check the last few bad endings. (I just went back to double check, and it turns out that it does restart automatically, after a very long timer.) I wonder if, for this ending in particular, it would make sense to offer a button/link to restart, or handling the timer a bit differently than the bad endings? Just a thought.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The power of an unexpected visual effect. When a game lulls you into a rhythm with its presentation, introducing an element that changes the UI so dramatically can intensify a key moment in the narrative, which happened here.
Memorable Moment:
A one-two punch: the first time the screen started to go dark; and then, the first time I realized a good ending might actually be possible.
That appears to be a wrap on my English-language EctoComp 2024 responses! I will probably be back later with some final thoughts. Thanks again to everyone who made these awesome games/pieces/stories and put them out into the world, and best of luck in the competition!
Thanks for playing! Funny how you mention cults, since one of the stories I listed as an inspiration was based on them. At least that’s how it was described to me: A Song for Lya is a take on “What if there was a cult that told the truth about everything, and following it really did make you a happier, more loving person and net you a place in eternal paradise?” I really liked that story’s exploration of how far people would go for belonging (and the eternal paradise, pretty good sell honestly). Also, the parasites. Seems like that came through in the game too.
Flickering is a glitch, think it’s some CSS loading quirk I didn’t have time to fix. Will hopefully take care of it post-comp.
Wow thank you for the in depth review! So much to unpack here, you’ve got me thinking too.
You are correct in the options tend to be flavour choices or small branch and returns. Unfortunately I found I needed to keep it on track to build it within the time limit with the amount I ended up writing on the main storyline. I would like to go back and expand it a bit at a later date to make it feel like the choices are more meaningful (especially I know the ending was a bit abrupt) while attempting to keep the hopeless cosmic horror feeling going if I can find a way to do so.
Thank you for saying you wish there was more. I’m sorry it left you hanging with the quick ending, at least I know that perhaps I should go back and fix this up a bit more after the comp has finished!
One of choicescript’s strengths is definitely that it allows you to make, set, track and if needed show variables and stats fairly easily wither in text or meter form. You’re right in that showing what the stats are doing can influence decision making though so it can be tricky to decide how to use them I agree. There’s also (IMO) a danger of if overused they can cause you to have to micromanage games in a way that you’re spending a lot of time checking stats and selecting more on how you think the game needs you to choose rather than how you might otherwise want to choose in order to pass through events successfully. (None of the games listed do this, it’s just something I’ve seen that people either tend to love or hate as a mechanic.)
. But for what it’s worth, I think adding some kind of visual flair to distinguish the final page/choice box would help to better prime the reader that the piece is ending. Because the choice box looks identical to the previous pages, and the player gets lulled into the rhythm of clicking through, it sort of obscured the other signals that this was an ending page.
