Draconic ECTOCOMP Reviews: Hoarding Shiny Things Edition

Competitions
,
41

Nightmares within nightmares

You’re trapped in a nightmare. But not just a nightmare. Every time you wake up it just changes—you might wake up from being chased by a monster to find your lover crumbling to dust in your arms. (Always “your lover”, not gendered, which is a nice touch even if it sometimes makes for awkward writing.)

This is a choice-based horror puzzle game written in Ink. Your goal is to break out of the recursive nightmare you’re in, and at first it seems like a Groundhog Day time loop, where there’s one “correct” path through the tree of options that will set you free. But there isn’t; there’s something else you have to do.

You need to use information from each nightmare in the others. When you’re being chased by a monster, you can run into a tattoo parlor, which reminds you of matching tattoos you and your lover got—and those tattoos are how you break out of the nightmare where they fall apart into dust. This works especially well in Ink, which keeps a transcript of all your past choices for you to consult.

The “aha!” moment of figuring out this puzzle was very cool. Unfortunately, the end result didn’t feel much different from “find the one correct path”. I just couldn’t figure out how to use the clues I was given: my lover wanted to go to the church and then get coffee, but the solution isn’t to go to the church or the coffee shop, it’s to go behind the church. In hindsight I can see how this makes sense, but while playing, I ended up lawnmowering the last nightmare (trying each option one by one) until I came across the one that worked.

All in all, it’s a very cool idea, and I like the sort of horror on show here—it’s different from anything else I’ve played in this comp, and offers very satisfying catharsis. But my experience would have been a lot better if the clues had been a little bit clearer, and some of the red herrings removed. I understand why some red herring options need to exist, for the puzzle to be satisfying instead of “click this link to win”. But I ended up giving up on the right answer to the final puzzle because those red herrings made me think I was on completely the wrong track.

4 Likes
42

Looks like you hit rating #600 after all even though you didn’t post rating #500 as you hoped! (I assume you reviewed right after you rated. We’re at 601 now, yay.)

It was sort of spooky in a cool way to see how I voted on an EctoComp game and then see the votes go up by not 1 but 2 & it’s also kind of neat to see who the other person (probably) was.

Obviously there’s no ghost in the computer or website but it was fun to imagine that anyway.

2 Likes
43

Ha! I didn’t even notice that! That is extremely satisfying!

3 Likes
44

I really thought I was going to get 600 with my 17 ratings at once but you just beat me!

3 Likes
45

BLACKOUT

The Singularity has come. The world (as you know it) will end in seven days. What will you do?

This is a melancholic, somewhat mournful short story with a choice-based interface. It has the odd interface gimmick that the first click on any link just distorts it into a blurred mess, and you have to click it a second time to actually do anything; I’m not sure what purpose this serves, except to make certain “click a link within three seconds or the game will do it for you” choices even more annoying.

Interface aside, I enjoyed the story a lot. You have seven days left to live. There’s only one choice: what will you spend those days doing? Going out and interacting with the people around you? Or staying in and trying to work on your art? Neither of them really means anything, in the end—neither your work nor your friends will outlive you. So what meaning will you make of them? The writing is sad and bleak, but also more than a little bit hopeful, in an existential way.

Like with Cell 174, this is a work that I’d call a short story rather than a game. The focus is really on the writing, and what it encourages the player to think about. If you knew this was the end of everything, that nothing in your world would exist a week from now, what would you want to be doing? What would matter to you? The game somewhat tries to offer an answer—if you try to split your time between writing and socializing, you don’t really accomplish either, and then your character regrets it all at the end—and I somewhat wish it didn’t. But there is plenty to contemplate, all the same, and this work has a particular feel that’s unlike anything else in the comp.

2 Likes
46

And now I’ve rated every Petite Mort game! If I have some time to spare before the deadline, I’ll launch a brief foray into the Grand Guignol and see if I can comment on a few.

But first, one last note:

The Enigma of the Old Manor House

This one’s my own game, so I can’t rate it. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s fun!) But I want to give it a blurb for the sake of anyone learning about the ECTOCOMP entries from this thread.

This last entry is a puzzley parser game written in Inform 7. You play as a teenager who’s been dared to break into the spooky old mansion on Halloween night, and find the truth behind the rumors. Because it can’t really be haunted, can it?

And there we go, I’ve now written up every Petite Mort game! On to the Grand Guignol!

6 Likes
47

Also, while I look over the Grand Guignol entries, are there any that you, the readers, would particularly recommend? Either because they’re particularly short, or you think they fit my tastes, or you wrote them, or any other reason. I’ve been cautious about reading others’ reviews, but I remember people talking about a time loop puzzle, which sounds fun. (I tested Civil Seeming Drivel Dreaming and Escape from Hell, which could put them either at the top of the list since I know a lot of the puzzles and am more likely to finish them before the deadline, or at the bottom of the list because I’ve already seen them.)

3 Likes
48

There are a lot of short ones and a lot of good ones, but not as many that are both. The first short good one that came to my mind is ‘the good ghost’. It’s five acts but each one is just a few minutes.

4 Likes
49

I heartily concur about The Good Ghost. That game was the first IF game my husband ever liked.

4 Likes
50

I thought This Old Haunted House had a fun gimmick that you can get to grips with pretty quickly; it also has a great Easter Egg.

1 Like
51

God is in the Radio is fairly short for a single playthrough, at least if you read fast.

1 Like
52

I dunno about short (it ain’t super short), but The Spectators is super quality, don’t miss on it.

4 Likes
53

Hilariously I meant to be through the intro scene in half an hour but I lost track of time and spent an hour twenty or so on it and whoops! there went my time budget. Rhyming is hard, it turns out.

1 Like
54

Civil Seeming Drivel Dreaming

The first Grand Guignol I’m playing is also one that I tested, because it’s currently got only 12 ratings and I’d like to increase that number. This is another of Schultz’s Prime Pro Rhyme Row games, like There Those Dare Doze, based on rhyming alliterative pairs of words.

This one has some very helpful features that TTDD lacked, such as telling you when a command is half-right, or needs a homophone, and giving hints in return for good-but-wrong guesses. It means that coming up with a good pair feels good, and actually helps you in the game, even when it’s not the solution the author had in mind.

Unfortunately, the implementation of these features feels incomplete. Examining the help device, for example, only tells you how to turn it on—even when it’s already on—and prints “(hard to do without taking it, so you do)” every time, even when you already have it. It’s supposed to tell you when you have a command half-right, but sometimes didn’t, for no apparent reason. (I typed PHONING FAE instead of PHONING FEY and got a generic error.)

The writing similarly feels a lot less coherent than in TTDD. The plot of that game was slightly absurd (which is to be expected from a wordplay game like this) but both the story and the geography made sense: you’re travelling in different directions to find other people, and convince them to help you wake the Prayer Pros in the Rare Rows.

This game is a lot vaguer, without much of an overarching structure or geography to connect its various areas. And while it has a lot more rhymes implemented than TTDD, I was still often annoyed when a perfectly good pair wasn’t recognized. (Or, in one case, caused an RTP: “TOE TALL” at the Woe Wall led to a division by zero.)

Finally, for a specific example, there’s a place where the author has clearly put a lot of effort into punishing players who use a bad word (you’re asked to find rhymes for “why witch” and the game tells you specifically not to insult the woman in front of you; if you do, the game snarks at you and crashes itself). But I have to wonder—who does this benefit? Whose experience is improved by this feature? The writing is nice and snarky, but wouldn’t it have been better to just leave the command unrecognized (as other unpleasant words are; you can’t rhyme “wee wight” with “she shite”, for example), and dedicate that effort to polishing the rest of the game? It reminds me somewhat of Graham Nelson going to great pains to hide “swearing mildly” and “swearing obscenely” from Inform 7’s index…which just made it really annoying to remove them if you didn’t want them, and didn’t really benefit anyone.

All in all, I had fun with it. The wordplay puzzles were great! And I think there’s a really solid, really fun game between CSDD’s user-friendliness and hint system and TTDD’s cohesive plot and well-arranged structure. I just wish it had been one game instead of two, because as it is, both of them felt slightly lacking.

1 Like
55

Escape from Hell

This is the other Grand Guignol I tested. It’s a very cool experiment: a “parserless parser” game (in a custom-made framework no less), which has a parser-y world model but no free-form input. Instead, you’re presented with a list of possible commands each turn: moving in different directions, taking various objects, and so on. It also has a map which shows your location and the locations of any NPCs you’ve met, which is extremely convenient in a game of this size (49 rooms in a 7×7 grid).

The only commands given to interact with objects are TAKE, DROP, TALK TO, and POSSESS, and the last of those is the core of the game: you’re a demonic spirit trying to escape from Hell by jumping from body to body. Each person you can possess adds one additional verb (an accountant can COUNT, an overseer can WHIP, a succubus can SMOOCH, a golem can SHOVE, a ghost can RAGE, a vampire can BITE, and so on), so maneuvering the right bodies to the right places is the key to solving many of the puzzles. (EXAMINE is also on the verb list but is just for flavor and never necessary.)

The overall tone of the game is light and whimsical, but never falls across the line into outright goofiness: the protagonist takes their escape attempt very seriously, as they break into the palace of the Princes of Hell and try to distract each of them away from the alarm. I really liked the writing, and spent a long while just counting forms in the first room, looking at the crimes that had gotten various IF protagonists sentenced to eternal damnation. (“Naomi Cragne: …I don’t know where to even start…”) And the humor hadn’t grown stale by the end of the game, which is no mean feat!

The puzzles were also quite good, and the body-swapping (with each body having a single extra verb) was a clever way to allow a wide variety of actions without overwhelming the player with links. There’s only one I consider unfair: as the ghost, you can click the grayed-out direction links to pass through walls. While I did need a couple hints, everything else felt quite reasonable with the limited options presented, and figuring out how to get Bernard out of the office was a great moment of discovery.

2 Likes
56

The Good Ghost

Oh, this was lovely. A choice-based story about a ghost bound to a family home, materializing at five different points in the life of the mother and son who live there, and trying to help them. There are some basic puzzles (mostly about examining everything and then figuring out which thing will be useful in each situation), which make the story feel more personal—it helps me relate to the protagonist and their curiosity and their motivation to help.

The overall tone is melancholy in a very sweet way. You’re no longer alive; none of the people in the story can see you, or know that you’re there, or how you’ve saved them. But that doesn’t really matter. You’ve manifested to help them, and that’s what you’re going to do, whether they know it or not.

The final scene (“Act V”) consists of two reveals, one after another; the second I’d been suspecting for a while (you’re not the ghost of a human) but that didn’t make it any less touching. And then you finally pass on, just as the family starts to realize who and what you were. It was very sweet, and may or may not have brought a tear to my eye.

An excellent little piece, and another one that I recommend to everyone.

3 Likes
57

As a side note, I’m very amused by a certain parallel.

Spoilers for both The Good Ghost and The Enigma of the Old Manor House: I see I’m not the only one who thought it would be cute to have the ghost be an actual ghost, but the ghost of a pet instead of a person!

1 Like
58

And a quick follow-up on this: I was telling my partner about some of my favorite games in this comp, and when I got to Something Blue they said “oh, like Bluebeard” before I’d even mentioned the name or that it was an adaptation of a famous story.

So it seems I am in fact the only one who didn’t recognize the husband until several letters in. Just me and Helen Compton.

5 Likes
59

Oof, that’s rough.

On the plus side, “recognize that I’m in a folk tale that ends quite badly” is a skill that’s much less useful in real life than it is in IF.

2 Likes
60

And hey, I got what I think is the best ending on my first try, so my/Helen’s strategy worked!

2 Likes