Drew Cook says nice things about some Ectocomp games

Competitions
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You’re welcome to! I have blogs where I could have done this if I had wanted to. I chose a discussion thread in case somebody felt like discussing things.

Yes! People make good games all year 'round. I don’t really review games; I gave that up a couple of years ago. But I DO feel like things outside of IF Comp (which I’ve never reviewed at all) always need a lift, and I keep saying Ectocomp is one of my favorite things on the calendar. So here I am.

well, each according to their ability and all that :slightly_smiling_face: But in seriousness, I enjoy this thread because I like talking about themes and cultural context. Or critical practice. I’m glad I could be the one to mention abjection in the horror-themed media event. Even if you don’t buy that lens, it rounds things out to have someone talk about it. I am generally writing responses that I would enjoy reading as an author. I’m sure I’d enjoy reading yours, too.

Thanks for engaging with the ideas in this thread!

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If you follow me on Bluesky, you know that I’ve been replaying Bloodborne. I almost always have a Soulsborne game going, because I can reliably get into hyperfocus with them. Yes, I know they are stressful for many players, but they are part of my self-care practice.

There is no question that Bloodborne is my favorite among them. Mechanically, I love its emphasis on speed and aggression. Narratively, it is the very rare cosmic horror video game that manages to come across as vividly and oppressively strange. I’ve mentioned strangeness more than once in this thread, specifically kinds of interior or subjective strangeness. In cosmic horror, though, it is external. Going further, it is existential. The universe is vast and vastly unknowable. Somehow, it is simultaneously hostile and indifferent.

H.P. Lovecraft, as problematic as he is influential, created the Cthulhu mythos, in which humans fail to reckon with incomprehensibility itself. His is a long reach, as many contemporary stories affirm.

The Depths of Madness
Jacic

spoilers

I appreciate how direct this work is with regard to identifying its inspirations. The title recalls Lovecraft stories “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Horror from the Depths.” The logo is a red-eyed cephalopod. And, yes, there is a bit of R’lyehian–a language invented by Lovecraft.

I think this is all working well as a La Petite Mort offering. Leveraging an already-established cosmology, the author can focus on the content itself. The interface feels appropriately aquatic. The prose approximates Lovecraft’s style, making effective–if perhaps a tad overcooked in a very genre-appropriate way–use of adjectives and adverbs to create dense, atmospheric sentences. Just as I appreciated Amanda Walker’s decision to use a keyword-matching system for An Admirer, I recognize how choosing a recognizable and well-liked rhetorical model almost certainly helped this author make the most of the time available to them.

What of the results, then? I found the overall effect of prose, interface, and choice to be compelling. Other reviewers have noted that the ending felt abrupt, and I can see where they are coming from. I definitely would play a longer version of The Depths of Madness if one were to emerge, unbidden, from the unthinkable depths beyond the stars.

Quite polished-looking for an LPM offering! A strong entry with a substantial amount of text, given the constraints.

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Perhaps this is a settled question now, but when I was in graduate school “speculative fiction” was one of those terms people used for the vibes of it. In my conception and in that time, it was concerned with the near-real. Perhaps a single, fantastical element represented an intrusion or disruption of the real. Such disruptions can say something about the fragility of experience, or about our relations with others and society.

The Column
Sarah Wilson

spoilers

The Column identifies its characters in terms of their roles within a larger group. In a constrained writing situation, this strategy can do a lot of work for an author. We have our own ideas about the sorts of people who do these things, and I imagine that few readers will approach them as blank slates. They are rather types–The Column is ultimately a story concerned with social and vocational connectedness–that we might sort intuitively. The two speculative elements–a cave and the titular column–create the disruptive and deadly narrative fulcrum, but it is the social reality that will either save or doom the protagonist. Whom should the player trust? As the game repeatedly insists, we don’t know these people. We know what we see, tactically, during this trial, and we know their roles.

This makes for a great setup as a speculative work, because, despite the fantastical element, the central problem is assessing strangers with a limited data set: something that we humans do all the time. I was briefly worried that this would all lead into some sort of logic puzzle where the captain lies 2/3 of the time but the cook is honest 4/5 of the time and so forth and what not, but no such thing happened. Thank goodness!

I see that other reviewers wanted fewer characters, or else more realized ones. I would like to emphatically push back against that idea. While perhaps a little more information would be interesting, ultimately The Column is compelling to me because it is a story about being surrounded by and dependent upon strangers. Realizing the characters would turn the story into something else: an Agatha Christie mystery, perhaps.

The use of roles to define characters reminded me of Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, of all things, a story of less fantastic yet no less desperate survival.

I was very impressed by what seems like careful planning and time management. There’s a lot of well-written, carefully paced prose here to admire.

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The source code is public, so this isn’t a secret: the protagonist of Repeat the Ending is referred to in-code as the “Poet,” even though we always see him called “D.”:

Poet is a person.
The printed name of Poet is "the failed poet".

My MFA specialization is poetry, and it’s possible for me to get a little wonky about encountering it in media, particularly if a work is concerned with writing poetry. This isn’t something that helps while reviewing media about writing poems; nobody is looking for some kind of inside baseball treatment of craft poetry or creative practices. It’s pretty boring, I think, so I have to get myself in the right headspace so that I don’t talk everyone to sleep.

Forevermore
Stewart C. Baker

spoilers

Forevermore is about a self-serious man with a nice house and enough free time to experiment with poetry during the day. It’s a little goofy: he practices the dark arts, apparently, as implied by the plaster skull in his office. His door was once dark and ominous, but the housekeeper scrubbed it too thoroughly. And so on.

The goal is to construct a poem, and there’s a really nice interface for getting this done. A meter at the top of the screen shows the current balance between “broodiness” and “distraction.” While this isn’t a management simulation, the values do affect the poem being written. At right, a “live” draft shows the current state of the poem. There is a darkness in the wings: the protagonist’s wife is dead and gone, and there is a real danger that he will surrender–temporarily, one hopes–to despair.

I sincerely enjoyed my time with Forevermore, and found three of the possible poems/endings. I may go back and try for the other two. I applaud the author’s credible effort to approximate the famed rhythm of Poe’s “The Raven,” as it generally comes across convincingly and, when appropriate, quite humorously.

It’s possible that some audiences might consider Poe’s story too tragic to ever really embrace this light experience. I think that’s a valid response, but ultimately “The Raven” is far too well-known to be constrained by biography’s gravity. It’s very easy for me to recommend Forevermore as an enjoyable and well-constructed work. I am additionally impressed that this was completed in four hours!

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Your review is extremely moving to me.

spoilery talk

First, a lot of consideration went into my game as relates to the player’s experience of estrangement—but a Petite Mort can only go so far, and while I had ambitious ideas about where paths might lead, I didn’t get as far as I would’ve liked. The fact that this piece resonated with you despite its limitations is so heartening to hear.

I too am not interested in lots of explanation. You say you had a meaningful experience—I am flattered, and my work here is done. But I will say that the themes of estrangement and a meta-textual solidarity among the estranged are very important to me.

Forgive me for the plug, but if you’re interested in more horror born from the psychedelia of everyday existence, specifically as relates to mental illness and estrangement, I wrote a (non-interactive) novel about my experience with hearing voices and paranoia. It’s called I Hear You Watching. The experience was partially spurred by a deep-seated fear of estrangement in me. Spoiler alert: I am strange, just not in the ways I expected, haha.

Thank you again for your beautiful response to my game.

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I haven’t done so yet, but I had already decided to pick up your novel based on my experience with Yarry. I’m so glad you’ve given me a chance to tell you directly! I hope we get to see more IF from you in the future.

Drew

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Commenting elsewhere regarding my experience with Dee Cooke’s Ghost Hunt, I said that I really enjoyed imagining my young self as a happy kid. That’s something Ghost Hunt accomplished for me. That’s a kind thing for a bit of media to do, isn’t it? Help someone see themselves happy.

Rustjaw
mathbrush

Summary

Rustjaw is a very clever piece, as it is able to operate on multiple levels of meaning. It is the sort of non-graphic horror that would be at home in the books I bought at grade school book fairs. It features monstrous creatures with strong art and mildly humorous descriptions. My friends and I would have greatly enjoyed reading, telling, or hearing tales of such creatures!

Nothing could have prepared you for how they smell, a combination of bile and fast food styrofoam that has sat out in the sun too long. Their form, completely liquid, is constantly pulsing and reforming, leaving steaming acid everywhere it touches. You think you can see chunks of bone and skin swirling inside, which almost wave in motion to you, inviting you to come and join them.

The “fast food styrofoam” is a nice touch, isn’t it? We kids loved this kind of gross-out description. Enjoyable campfire fare to be sure.

At the same time, there is an adult level to Rustjaw’s narrative. The monsters seem to emerge from online and pop-culture phenomena. There is a stated “closeness” metric which calls to mind dating simulation mechanics. The real-world phenomenon of romantic and/or more adult interests in the monstrous is implied, though i never felt that it was being mocked in a derisive way. Here, a “date” involves pursuit by one of four monsters, and there are three outcomes: merge, marry, or rejection. That’s right, you ultimately can choose whether to continue (in death/transformation) with a monster or “dump” them.

Young me would have laughed about this. A lot. Adult me does, too. I appreciate how open things are, meaning-wise. Is this about monsters? Is it a figurative treatment of romance generally? Or romance mechanics in games? Is it just a cool place to put some good art?

For me, it’s a bit of everything. This is a generous game (in four-hour terms) with a good deal of text that led me to many enjoyable thoughts of internet discourse, video game tropes, and, perhaps most rewardingly, the thought of myself and my friends having a good laugh in what is now another century.

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Oh, thank you so much! I’d be interested to hear what you think of it. But also, no pressure and no rush.

I will absolutely continue with IF. I’ve been a longtime player and admirer, but am just now diving into creation.

I’ve finally started learning Inform, which is exciting/daunting. Ryan Veeder said the perfect intro lesson is “implementing your boring apartment,” so I might try implementing the apartment from a specific moment in my novel/life. A bit more interesting than my current home…

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The boring apartment is a thing, for sure. I did a boring trailer for variety’s sake.

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Thank you, your review made me feel like it was worth writing my game.

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Thank you so much for the thoughtful review of my game and especially with regards of whether or not it’s managed to capture something of Lovecraft’s style in the way I hoped. Really appreciate it :smiling_face:

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Aww that’s lovely, thank you! I wanted it to be a cosy and childlike Hallowe’en experience, so it’s great to hear that worked so well for you!

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Thank you for your review! Glad to hear you enjoyed clicking through the story

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A lot of choice games have an ephemeral quality. If a work does not support saves, there is no way to get back to a previous passage without starting over. This used to bother me, as a person who grew up playing parser games. I wanted transcripts! I wanted to maintain twenty saved games with a hard-to understand naming convention!

I think this was occasionally reasonable. Games with a heavy mechanical emphasis or with fail states can get frustrating after a while. But most of the time, that wasn’t the case. I was just habituated to seeing any part of a text whenever I wanted. In a lot of cases, what I needed to do was try to embrace an aesthetic of ephemerality. Time is a one-way trip, and perhaps some works are best experienced that way.

As the Eye Can See
Skyshard

spoilers

Those of you who follow my work already know: my mother “passed away one week before Christmas, 2020, at the height of the COVID outbreak in the United States.” That being so, I experienced As the Eye Can See as a kind of terrible sweetness. This review isn’t about that, but it is an opportunity to question the concept of the “objective review,” in which audiences can supposedly experience things as blank slates, as empty vessels.

Thematically and structurally, As the Eye Can See is potently ephemeral. The past is slippery, mirage-like. Time moves forward with clarity, but the past is hard to access. There is something mournful about it sometimes, it comes to us as loss. It makes sense that we readers cannot flip back and reread an earlier passage; we only have our memories of them. Are they clear? Were we paying attention?

Were we paying attention to the right things.

I strongly feel that, as in all good poetry, its structure is its meaning, inseparable from its content.

Go back far enough, and the voice of a mother emerges from an unseen source. The memory is only the memory of a sound. It grows indistinct behind us. Can it remain ours? Can we hold onto it? I’m reminded of one of my favorite John Berryman lines: “Fall is grievy, brisk.”

I think there is more to say, but perhaps I am not the one to say it. Quite moving.

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I love making playlists for my work. In fact, my intent is to release one with every game I make. Do people listen to them? It’s hard to say, because I don’t know what a “normal” amount would be. If you ever play my games, please consider checking them out!

Narthex
Wilem Ortiz

spoilers

This is my first encounter with the Moiki authoring system. My impressions were quite positive! Narthex has charming graphics of a friendly, larval demon. Your relationship with Narthex is an interesting parallell. You, the protagonist, are anxious about a social event and hope to overcome that challenge. Narthex, meanwhile, needs to develop as an entity. You both are on sort of a journey of growth, then. The story centers around a song that empowers Narthex: he matures and becomes more powerful thanks to pure rock and roll vibes.

That’s right, the central showpiece of Narthex is a song, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

So, going down the feature set, this game has enjoyable graphics, a pleasantly light tone, a solid song. This is a great first impression for the Moiki platform! I visited the website, and it looks very polished.

I really liked the game and it’s vibes. It was a nice pick-me-up today, and I would love to see more from Narthex in the future.

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I’ve already talked about enjoying games that young Drew would enjoy. It’s a very pleasant sort of nostalgia. In fourth grade, I remember getting a book at the book fair about a boy my age who befriended a young vampire girl. I don’t recall if staples of general vampire mythology were enforced. For instance, I think the vampire friend was the boy’s age, and not centuries old or some such thing.

I hail from a more unsophisticated time (this would have been 1980). It was the boy’s story exclusively; he was at the center of the tale. The girl is the Other and a source of anxiety. College Drew likely would have found some sort of psychoanalytical reading to latch onto. Nowadays, books have young women vampires for protagonists. They get their own books; they are the center of their lives. This is good; I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, young Drew loved that book. He loved the idea of having a vampire friend. As I said in my review of Ghost Hunt: I dreamed of finding the switch that would allow me access to a hidden world of magic.

The Abandoned House Down the Lane
EldritchRenaissanceCake

spoilers

AHDL is an Adventuron game in which a person grows increasingly obsessed with an abandoned house on their street. Before long, they are dreaming of it. One night, they rise from bed and break in. A strange force compels them. Once inside, they encounter a few speed bumps. Things must be picked up and dropped; a faucet must be turned. This would have been a good level of mechanical engagement for me as a young person. I would have felt accomplished, but rarely frustrated.

Like some other reviewers, I did not examine the faucet. Psychologically, I wonder why? I consider myself conditioned to examine everything. Perhaps in some way I am examining things in order to find a use. Because the faucet had an apparent use, I never examined it. If the faucet didn’t work, on the other hand, I’m sure that I would have had a look. Anyway, that isn’t a criticism so much as it is food for thought. I usually examine things, except there are cases where I don’t. Apparently without thinking about the difference.

I loved the friendly vampire. The hugging vampire. This is an element that is nice as a reversal of expectations. It’s also nice for the sheer niceness of it. I would have loved to befriend a vampire as a child, to enter the world of magic made plain by their existence. The hard thing for me to accept would be the closing of the door: the next day, it’s over, as if it never happened. I wouldn’t have wanted to return to a world without magic.

Nevertheless, this is another case where young Drew would have enjoyed an Ectocomp story. The puzzles would have been just enough to make me feel victorious. The nice details of the home and the surprise wholesomeness of the ending would have felt really satisfying. It is a positive emotional experience to imagine how much fun I would have had with The Abandoned House Down the Lane as a young person.

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I have an admittedly futile desire to resist the term “Faustian bargain.” One reason is that the first “big” Faust Stories have unambiguously Christian implications. I don’t necessarily want to bring all of that context to my little review thread. The other is that I see texts featuring encounters with otherworldly entities as part of a larger, legalistic framework. Persephone got in trouble for eating pomegranate seeds, for instance. The invisible world has many rules that bind.

You Promise
Aster Fialla and Jake Gardner

spoilers

Supernatural contract law stories are often advanced or resolved via word games or wordplay. For instance: absent a great deal of luck, the protagonist of You Promise (the Esteemed Host) will discover (unpleasantly) that their words are subject to a kind of malevolent literalism. It is up to the player to carefully evaluate all that is said and heard. Is there any amount of interpretive “play” that would allow our nemesis, the so-called Honored Guest, to twist or misinterpret our words?

It may or may not be surprising that I enjoyed the presentation of this adversary.

It looms in the doorway, imposing yet somehow modest, and carries a fine leather briefcase in one hand, closed with a shining brass combination latch. You don’t know what you expected It to look like, but right now It appears as some sort of businessperson wearing a silk blouse, pencil skirt, and black high heels. The only tip-offs are Its eyes—a ruddy red color, and Its long hair shining like metallic bronze by the light of the moon.

Of course It should appear in professional attire. How fitting!

I think the “good” ending is perfect. The protagonist is unwilling to spend the money. While they say that they might do so soon, it isn’t at all clear whether the money will go to use. Would doing so mark the beginning of a new round of bargaining? Would it renew the relationship between Guest and Host? I felt this ambivalent or anxious conclusion very credible. This leaves me torn, as I would love more of this game but would hate to see the ending change too much.

This is the last La Petite Mort I’ll be looking at! I have a few GG games I want to get to still.

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Does anyone remember the Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit?” Well, I hate to spoil it if you haven’t, but it suggests convincingly that it is possible to inhabit an afterlife without knowing its nature. Sartre’s No Exit, which DemonApologist mentioned while discussing your life, and nothing else, is another such story. There are undoubtedly others. So far as I know, this trope is limited to discovering one is in Hell. Finding oneself in Heaven, barring some deepely-felt religious objections, is not a suitably ironic twist of the knife.

your life, and nothing else
Lionstooth

spoilers

Is this a “suprise, you’re in hell” story? It isn’t completely clear, and I think I prefer it that way. However, it is obvious that the protagonist is somewhere figurative. That is, everything here–an apartment building–seems mere overlay, something draped over a rich symbology. The game’s opening, set in the protagonist’s apartment, is mostly framing for rich cultural signifiers.

Posters on the walls are the only real source of color in the room. When you stare through them long enough, you can see a wolf, a row of hearts, crossed swords.

What is this display meant to mean? There is “a wolf”, not, as a silly example, “that wolf from your favorite anime, WolfTron 9999.” We are given nothing to work with. Whatever we see in that wolf, it is something we have carried to the game with us. My initial thought was of tarot cards, since the swords and hearts (cups) are suits. There is a wolf on the Moon card, for instance, but ultimately this is a work that is associative: your life, and nothing else reminds us of things, but it is not those things itself.

There are three neighbors, and they each need things. They don’t need them all at once, so the core loop of the game is helping one neighbor, then the next, then the last. The neighbors also seem rather saturated with significance.

  • The thirsty man. He is associated with water. "His laughter, when it comes, is surprising yet inevitable, a hot spring bubbling up from unseen depths.
  • The lovers. “The couple are entwined on their loveseat, watching something in a language you don’t understand on a flickering television. Candles are burning throughout the room, and the air is heavy with vanilla and sandalwood.”
  • The fruit woman, ultimately satiated by a pomegranate. “She slices into the mango, pries seeds from the pomegranate with long nails, holds a berry to your lips.”

As I’ve already suggested, it’s very tempting (and perhaps fully achievable) to assert a one-to-one relationship between occult symbology (tarot most of all) and these representations, but I think doing so robs them of a pleasantly general associative power.

The descriptions of these neighbors tend toward decay and discord as the story progresses, even though their stated needs have been met. An urgency emerges. The player can drink and forget–the waters of the Lethe? If you try to leave, it is discovered that the protagonist is the three others as well, each presumably facets of the one. The three images in the bedroom make a similar implication.

Still, even after trying to escape, the protagonist is forced to drink by… someone? There is a crowd. In the crowd is the wolf. Since there is a cycle of waking, realizing, forgetting, and waking implied, a “suprise, you’re in hell” reading is reasonable, though I prefer experiencing this game in a more open way.

All of this talk about the elliptical nature of your life, and nothing else does little to acknowledge the many fine sentences along the way. The prose is, despite its uncertain subject matter, crisp and direct. Evocative. A strong work that I enjoyed thinking about!

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What makes for a mechanically satisfying game? I suppose a lot of things might, but my favorites tend to have a loop. Note that I’m not a games studies person or a narratologist or even a ludologist, I’m just a guy who knows what he likes. And I like a good loop. What is a loop? It’s just an action or activity that repeats, sometimes in measures of increasing complexity, throughout the course of a game. In Enchanter, we find spells to cast spells to find spells, and so forth. In games like Bloodborne, we alternate between exploration and more narrow, boss-punctuated tests of endurance. In Hadean Lands, players solve alchemical problems to attain new recipes and reagents that can solve more difficult alchemical problems. And so forth.

I write about such things sometimes. I’ve advised new authors to try to come up with a rewarding loop at the beginning of a project, because a loop is a kind of writing prompt.

Familiar Problems
Daniel, Ada, and Sarah Stelzer

spoilers

This is the first video gamey game that I’ve played this Ectocomp, and that’s not a putdown! In fact, I chose to play Familiar Problems specifically because I anticipated an engaging loop with a growing power set. I was not disappointed. The protagonist familiar begins as a green blob but has acquired a varied arsenal by game’s end. We gain power by consuming our fellow familiars. I guess that does raise some metaphysical questions, but it never feels terribly serious.

Perhaps they all get to escape at the adventure’s end.

It’s a university setting with some gentle mockery directed at various departments. The humor is enjoyably light; it never tries too hard.

I haven’t encountered many puzzles in this year’s Ectocomp. That changes here! A lot of the puzzles in Familiar Problems are very enjoyable, and the gameplay always keeps the core loop at the center of things. There’s no non-sequitur water level puzzle, for instance. We use our powers to make progress. The final problem, which involved multiple powers in multiple locations, was very well-designed. I enjoyed realizing that I would need to toss the graduate student through the window; a very nice ah-ha!

The cover art is quite charming. Seeing the text “familiar problems,” which is a bit of a commonplace phrase, above three of what I assumed (correctly) were familiars made me laugh aloud.

We haven’t talked about the interface yet, which is burying the Lede, really. This Dialog game has a showstopping presentation complete with a clickable map as well as standard and script text outputs. It is 100% playable as a mouse-only game (I did so). The level of polish and convenience on display here is truly impressive.

I think the core mechanic here is interesting enough to drive a larger game. I’m sure many would feel the same way.

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Thank you so much for the review, and we’re very glad you enjoyed it!

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