dgtziea's EctoComp 2025 Thoughts (Warden: a (bug)folk horror)

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Hi. I’m a scaredy cat so I tend to generally avoid horror anything, including horror IF. But I’ve played some EctoComp entries, and here are some thoughts.

Not gonna be full reviews, mostly just acknowledging what I played. Appreciate the work of all the authors and the organizers!

Walk A Mile In My Shoes

A short little scenario in a parser. Good premise! I think it was interesting going back and reading the descriptions again after it was over.

I think I tried WEAR CLOTHES as my first command, and it responded with something a bit odd, and then trying WEAR CLOTHES again gave me a different response. I wonder how you look in the end, what makes the kids scream?

How To Never Talk To Other People Again

Well, this is a way more thought-provoking and unsettling work than anything else I tried pretty much, which were for the most part fun spooky micro-stories.

It’s the sort of Twine work that we tend to attach “personal” to, so not escapism in the least. But this certainly resonates. If you’re receptive to this sort of work, I think it’s well worth playing. Pay attention to the content warnings.

There are external links, and when I clicked on them I got an error page using Firefox desktop, but I got around it by middle-clicking on the links which opened them in a new tab. So you could just do that if you run into the same issue.

The intro says everything in this is fictional. Yes, of course, everything. You, me, and any thoughts and fears and anxieties we separately might share, as all the platforms we virtually exist on eagerly point us all towards an AI future that none of them quite understand the shape of, either.

…We used to say the internet wasn’t real life, didn’t we?

I have no verbs and I must

Very dreamlike (or nightmarelike). The writing is sometimes serious, sometimes not, flipping through a bunch of scenarios. There were a few that didn’t seem to pose an imminent threat, so I tried other verbs there.

I think the fun of this, though, is partly intentionally dying as well, to see the unique deaths.

I think the very last scene could’ve been sold a bit more, as in, I think both description and response could feel slightly longer, and FEEL a bit more real than the others but I still see what is was going for, and that scene definitely does pose something more scary than all the nightmares.

The Walking Man

So sort of a mythological horror/curse type figure. Neat! Some good setup and tension.

The walking scene was less effective than the others for me, but overall effective with a great ending.

As a scaredy cat, I appreciate how obvious the laptop was setting it up, so I was priming myself up for something to show up after that even though I didn’t know how it would happen; but yeah, assuming the Ectocomp audience is okay with jumpscares and the intent IS to give a scare, it did kind of take away from That Moment since I knew it was coming. I’d really want to know how it was achieved though, because I certainly didn’t expect it to happen the way it did.

You Promise

Played the english version, not judging it. A visitor at your door. A few choices. Good premise.

refused to share name first time. picked the third choice the second time, picked the right choice after that, got a “good” ending. Liked the mini-puzzle of figuring out the “right” choices. Wonder if there’s a way to re-word the second choice as well so it’s evident what I end up promising, because I picked it specifically because it seemed safest and nothing in that choice wording made me think I would be promising anything (So it felt a bit more like this was a short story I’m reading where it’s not quite linear, since that wasn’t a choice that quite reflected my player intentions).

One Fifty-Nine: Drowned Secrets

Choicescript. I wasn’t paying attention to the categories when starting games but this was in the longer one.

You’re a merfolk, caught by humans and sent on a dangerous undersea mission to a mysterious shipwreck. The humans have already sent teams down there before that haven’t returned.

Very CYOA, heavy on the adventure. As in, you’re put in a lot of precarious situations, fight or flight situations, speed vs stealth, those sorts of decisions.

It’s enthralling, although I do think it’s maybe SO many danger scenes at one point, one after the other, that the story/mission felt like it was progressing a bit slowly. Also some paragraph length variation might also up the pace, just cutting down or splitting some paragraphs. Provides a lot of good high-adrenaline scenes, and some really tough and scary decisions which really made me ponder what I should do. Also liked the setup as well (how motivated are you to actually help the humans?)

final stats/achievements

Name: ishmael.

Species: Merfolk.

Health:
Health: 75%

Voice attack: Used 2 times. Your voice is currently overstrained and may not be effective.

Items carried: Communications device. Knife. Torch. Compass.

Torch: Switched on.

the lamp of your body

Short story, sort of like a journal. A mysterious girl in your classes which you’re strangely drawn to. Forbidden fruit, temptation in different forms, perhaps something like abstinence, in different ways? Some nice prose and description.

I Got You

You’re on a date, someone, like a wingperson type, is giving you advice. Played through once, picked most of the funny responses (“howdy, partner!”), got rejected. Did not see anything horror-y at all, did found it enjoyable, would be extremely surprised if there wasn’t more in the other paths.

The Final Stew

This goes for a flashback story where it reveals how it’s going to end at the beginning, instead of the horror twist reveals some of the other entries have done. The music choice is fun, there’s a good sense of longing here, with a dash of submission.

Hey, you did consent to your fate!

Diary of a Drowned Girl

Using the whole card drawing and playing thing that the author’s Social Democracy Dendrynexus games also use. There’s some statuses that I think I’m supposed to balance through my choices. But I’m as bad at that as running a social democratic political party it turns out, keep dying without getting that far into this.

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That was the exact kind of feeling I was going for. Nice to see I achieved it.

Thanks! Even if it could have standed being longer, I’m glad you still found it effective.

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Thanks, this was actually the only reason I made the game! I wasn’t going to enter and then remembered I had a code snippet from a long time ago to use Bisquixe, a multimedia-enhanced version of Quixe I made, to play gifs in the background. I rushed the game production after that, and from the time I had the idea to the time I finished the game and added cover art was 3 hours (so the game itself is definitely choppy, unrevised and did not experience feedback). I’m glad you were intrigued by that effect since that was my only goal in writing the game!

The Inform code is:

Summary 
Sound of steps is the file "steps.ogg".
	
To finish the drama:
	css-set-fast ".BufferWindow; background-image; url('images/jumpscare.gif') ;";
	css-set-fast ".BufferWindow; background-size; cover ;";
	css-set-fast ".BufferWindow; height; 100vh;";
	css-set-fast ".BufferWindow; padding; 0;";
	css-set-fast ".BufferWindow; margin:0;";
	play sound of steps on foreground;

and the idea originally came from pseudavid, who did the exact same thing in Twine (but way more beautifully) with the short game The Moon Wed Saturn.
Thanks for the review!

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Thank you for playing and letting me know what you thought of my game @dgtziea ! That is a good tip about the paragraph length, I should look at that. And thank you for the final stats, it’s interesting to know where players are ending up by the end of the game. Glad you enjoyed it overall :smiley:

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Warden: a (bug)folk horror

A parser game, involving a bunch of anthropomorphic bug folks living in a little commune area in a field. Most of them live in a tree stump, and they built a kiln from an overturned flower pot, and they ride large beetles around and use needles as weapons and acorn caps as shields and can talk to each other. You’re the warden, and some bug folk seem to be missing. Track them down! There’s some light puzzles and little problems and tasks to solve, but this is also quite story-driven and exploration-based.

This has quite a bit of personality. The decent number of other characters all do, the setting does as well.Menu based dialogue. There’s an achievements system. You always have a goal which is great. Sometimes it isn’t clear how you go about that the goal; the game sometimes has certain steps and actions it wants you to take in order (find this, then that) but like I said, not a puzzle intensive game so it’s more like I just needed to look around more, instead of guess-the-verb issues or anything. I think the parts I spent the most time on was figuring out what it wanted from me to tame the beetle (I missed the stable at first, got too used to the bolded directions), and then also finding the second dug up dirt area on day 2. I did also… not realize that Flit was something to ride and not another bug to talk to when I entered the stable which caused me some confusion. I wanna shout out the fun little hand drawn maps in my inventory which were really neat! The in-game books are also well written, especially in that they’re succint and/or summarized and not that long when you read any.

The blurb on the Itch page tips its hand a bit as to what transpires, and I kind of wonder how this would have felt if it’d been entered in IFComp or Spring Thing and didn’t label itself horror quite so much, because the beginning part really did make it feel like a game that could be for kids. The story gradually builds as you go around and talk to people and explore until it all culminates in a well done final stretch. (I think finding the body to the west felt a bit muted, like it didn’t seem that horrifying or super suspicious what their body looked like, and the ending talk with the witch also felt a bit rushed, especially in that it obviously seemed like only correct action is to just kill it and you’re not given a good reason not to that I could see, but also, it didn’t seem all that HARD. All the options with the witch at the end seemed passively and objectively presented as equal, there’s nothing pushing me towards any of them when it feels like all the internal voices should be screaming at me about what I should do, and my compromised emotional state should be spilling over. My mind isn’t compromised but I picked the bad-seeming choices anyways, and then went UNDO and picked the nice choices after that to reach the ending; if I didn’t have UNDO I’d have just picked the nice choices)

Anyways, I quite enjoyed it! Good story, cool setting and sense of place with everything feeling lived in (actually maybe the strongest aspect of this! Everyone you meet has their own little space and role they’ve carved out over time).

achievements unlocked

You have unlocked the following achievements:

Treat: Obtain a sweet treat
Trick: Wear a costume
Apothecary’s Assistant: Gather feverwort
Rest in Pieces: Tend to the stranger’s body
Easy, Old Girl!: Spook Flit
How to Train Your Beetle: Ride the red stag beetle
Won’t You Bee My Neighbor: Talk to all the folk around the stump
Close one: Survive parasite-free (Ending 5/5)

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One of the Warden authors here-- thanks for playing, and I really appreciate the input!

We definitely didn’t give ourselves enough time (we only decided to start writing an Ecocomp game five weeks before the deadline). Working so quickly meant we were so elbow-deep in making sure the game ran (more or less) well that even with testing it was hard to get some perspective on how it felt to play the game. I mention all of that just to emphasize how helpful it is to get a sense of what it feels to play through the final choices. Thanks again!

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