Ectocomp 2025: One-off review thread for people who don't want to review everything

Competitions
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I noticed that there were slightly less reviews this year; I think it might be intimidating to imagine reviewing all the dozens of games, and it can feel weird to start a thread and only review a game or two.

So I thought of making this thread for people who don’t usually post reviews to post one or two reviews of games they thought were interesting. It could be full reviews, general impressions, or even just a cool moment in a game that stands out.

It’s possible people won’t like this idea or use this thread, but that’s okay, I thought I’d just give it a try.

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What a nice idea! You read my mind. I drafted this review yesterday and might write more, but figure it won’t add up to enough to justify a separate thread. (Might post some more after the comp period.)

Stage Fright

By Daniel M. Stelzer, Ada Stelzer, and Sarah Stelzer

A theatrical game that manages to make script memorization and workplace safety hazards surprisingly fun! This Ectocomp entry was lighthearted in tone, and rich with Phantom of the Opera-inspired atmosphere. I’d recommend this for fans of theater or anyone looking for a puzzly-but-friendly limited-parser IF.

The highlight of the game design was in how the theatrical theme drove the mechanics by determining the player character’s capabilities and constraints. I won’t spoil all that by going into detail here, but it was a really nice complement of form and content. The smart writing also created a richly layered narrative environment, especially considering its co-authors spent just one week crafting this game (which, if I remember correctly, may have started life as a Petite Mort that became not-so-petite?). Lots of details in the writing deserving of a close reading or a second playthrough.

Admittedly I found myself liberally spamming the “think” option, and consulting the walkthrough for one or two steps. Even without hints, though, the game felt very solvable; aided significantly by the handy highlighted rooms and symbols in the mini map.

The game’s description tells us that player character’s “one guiding tenet” is that “the show must go on.” I did find myself wishing it was a little clearer to me how that goal was meant to motivate or propel the player character’s actions forward at any given moment (hence my impulse to spam “think” for guidance), aside from the overarching goal of gaining access to rooms so that I (the player, not the PC) could progress through the game. It’s possible my reading comprehension may be at fault, here; maybe the text was trying to tell me something and I just missed it. But I tend to think that the satisfaction of solving a puzzle (the difficulty of which, I think, includes the subtlety of its text) comes from the challenge of finding a solution to a clear problem. In “Stage Fright,” I ended up reverse-engineering a number of problems by finding their solution first (i.e., I have a hammer and I found a nail, so I guess I’ll try using it. But why does this object need nailing down, again?).

Eventually I found that my way forward was to just mess around with stuff. Mild spoilers for game mechanics: “Stake” anything and (everyone)! “Burn” things that seem flammable! Generally cause havoc with the hazards in the environment. Once I embraced this, I had fun with it; and the reveal at the conclusion of the story put it all into perspective.

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

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This thread has been quiet! Just me posting in here? :sweat_smile:

Super Halloween Horror Show

By Adam Biltcliffe @jwalrus

Super Halloween Horror Show has an air of unabashed campy fun in its hybrid of superhero and horror motifs, and the game’s title and cover image reflect this. Given that, I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle sophistication of this limited-parser Petite Mort in which emotional vulnerability is your greatest strength.

You play as a young superhero-in-training with more enthusiasm than experience. When villains strike at the City Commissioner’s Halloween party, you are thrust into the role of defending innocents and saving the day. I was quickly won over by the player character’s earnestness; the bold, pithy prose; and the clever game mechanics, which revolve around the protagonist’s changing emotional state.

The moment the game begins, you must make two discoveries to proceed: that your inventory will play a rather unconventional role, and that SHOW will become your go-to verb. With INVENTORY, SHOW, and the classic EXAMINE as your tools, you must gain entry to the Mansion and resolve a series of encounters with NPCs; including a fairly large cast of enemies and allies alike. I found that the puzzles hit a sweet spot of being complex enough to be satisfying and solvable without having to make wild leaps of logic.

A tangent about quality-of-life features in parsers (not really a critique of this game)

I hit an impasse at one point in this game, which I made it past with a hint from the author. It was definitely just something I had missed, and no fault of the author’s. But the specific way in which I got stuck just happened to be a perfect example of why including the option to highlight or boldface interactable objects, NPCs, and exits in room descriptions can be a huge help to making parsers games more accessible to players such as myself who are still getting acclimated to the genre.

Not sure how common this is; I have seen this feature often, but not consistently, in parser games. So this my plea to all parser authors to please consider adding this feature, if it is at all practical for you to do!

The author of this game was under a time constraint, of course, so I certainly understand that those sorts of QoL features can fall outside the scope of a LPM. I don’t count that against this game.

Super Halloween Horror Show has quite a lot going on for a small-scale game, including NPCs and elements of the environment that change and an NPC that moves between locations in response to your actions. I’ve never authored a game in Inform myself, but implementing a (seemingly bug-free) parser of this complexity within the constraints posed by an LPM is very impressive to me.

This game deserves more reviews!

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Thanks so much for the review!

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