Oookay. So. I do have other brief reviews of Comp games coming, eventually. But in the meantime, I felt that since I had made fun of it on social media I was also obligated to, well, open the bag and eat the proverbial dead dove. Besides, I don’t know that anyone else reviewing IFComp really has the uh, mental equipment for this one; I do have rather a lot of experience writing cannibalism material.
So yeah. Here’s my review of One (More) Week in Dolcett.
Now, obviously I am going to engage in some frank discussion of rather graphic matters pertaining to both sex and violence here. Most of my review is not really too concerned with the details, but the content warning still stands.
Also: I do have to say first of all that I do believe this game’s cover art was created with AI; it appears in fact to be traced over a collage of AI-generated images, which is something the commercial artist credited seems to specialize in. Therefore my actual “vote” on this is “I think this needs to be disqualified under rule 4”. But I don’t know that the author is aware that this is the case (the credited artist appears to be real, though their business also appears very much to be humanwashing AI output), although it takes a little bit too much assuming good faith to not notice it. It’s not really my interest or my priority here to try to get this author disqualified, anyway; I totally understand if organizers want to take the tack of taking people at their word, even if their word would in this case be really rather implausible. I have a lot more to say about the game itself than about this, but I felt it was worth addressing since it is kind of a blatant thing about the game.
I do believe the content of the game itself is not written by an LLM—or if it is, the author then cleverly inserted a bunch of malaprops and inconsistent punctuation usage to throw people off. It doesn’t really “smell” like LLM output; even if it does have a tendency to say things that don’t make any sense (much like an LLM), it doesn’t really do the classically-LLM thing of saying something that makes no sense but which sounds plausibly sensical enough that it’s easy to miss; the broken metaphors here in fact stand out like a sore thumb.
The last bit of important preamble here: I do not think this is a troll game. @jjmcc seems to think that is the case in his review, which is certainly a very normal and sane reaction to have. I however am neither of those things, and my familiarity with the darker recesses of the human mind tells me that this entry into the Interactive Fiction Competition, year of our lord MMXXVI, is in fact meant with utter and complete sincerity. Perhaps there’s an element of shock-the-normie being played here—it is a wild choice of venue to foist this on a poor unsuspecting IFcomp public—but if so it’s being played from the perspective of someone who really does think both that 1. eroticised cannibalism is hot, 2. stories about such are a venue for examining the Human Condition and portraying a protagonist’s Journey of Self Actualization. Frankly I am significantly more confused by the latter stance.
Now, I am a horror writer by trade, and I am absolutely no stranger to the eroticization of the transgressive—Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a movie I’d describe a an “ero-guro may-december queer romcom”, is my favorite movie of anything I’ve seen all year, as a point of reference. So where I’m coming from here is that I am entirely incapable of being shocked by anything going on here, and I can look past it to see that the eroticised violence is not, to be quite frank, particularly artful.
All this women-trussed-up-like-roast-birds stuff is already a little trite to begin with, one of those fetishes that very clearly someone got from watching Looney Tunes—that’s really where the trope of a sapient character in a roasting pan with an apple in their mouth comes from, isn’t it?—but it’s not helped by how this story belabors the point. The protagonist, who is of course comically horny for the idea of being killed and eaten, has a very specific idea of how she wants it to happen and her tastes are very basic. So this oven-roasting idea just recurs ad nauseam, feeling a little more rote each time. It’s all very bloodless, strangely enough.
It’s also not helped by the author’s fairly inexpert handling of complex scenes (often with significant numbers of characters and moving parts). The geography of events is often very muddled, and the prose is often more than a little lost in its own sauce, which gives the violence a very floaty quality. There’s both a lack of creativity and a sort of blunted effect from how vague the scenes are.
This is a sequel, apparently; the setup for the plot is that the protagonist, the titular Scarlett, has to go back to the Country Where Eating Women Is Legal for one last job: to rescue an innocent American woman who was, accidentally-on-purpose, shipped to Cannibal Disneyland where she will be eaten if Scarlett doesn’t intervene. The reasons for why this is Scarlett’s problem to solve are convoluted and nonsensical in the extreme, involving some kind of implausible boardroom-drama material that I found more appalling than anything in this game involving knives or an oven.
But the challenge in this would-be rescue is that, five years ago (during the original game this is a sequel to), our heroine Scarlett spent a week in Cannibal Six Flags and wouldn’t you know it, it Awoke Something In Her. Hence her desperately, violently horny reactions whenever someone suggests they might eat her, which are here presented through a “mindbreak” mechanic; timed sections in which the player is presented with a node full of “bad” links (all containing Scarlett’s all-caps horny thoughts begging to be killed and eaten) and a single “good” link standing in for her self-preservation impulses.
This I deem annoying more than anything. This game is (as far as I could tell from my two-ish hours of play) a completely linear story with no real systems, and each scene flows through a series of questions with right or wrong answers. The intent, which is bluntly tutorialized, is that you figure out the right answer based on context clues; choosing wrong gets Scarlett killed and eaten, which is what she wants but does lead to a game over. Checkpoints are frequent but not so frequent that there isn’t some laborious clicking to get back to where you made a mistake.
Erotica video games are, of course, frequently all about “bad ends”; those are the actual scenarios the player is expected to play for, not the mainline story that averts them. The kink, whatever it is, is often enacted by failure—failure to escape, to resist, to stay in control. So they often have balancing and checkpointing that would seem unusual in other genres, because the intent is to make the player see all those dead-end nodes. This only works if those dead ends feel interesting and earned and paced out appropriately, none of which is the case here. Basically every choice in this game can lead to an immediate game over; I spent a substantial amount of time backtracking through sequences figuring out what the right answers were. There’s absolutely no build up or tension to any of these game over passages because there is one for literally every branch.
Anyway. Our heroine Scarlett has come to Cannibal Knott’s Berry Farm to rescue a woman named Zoe, who was accidentally-on-purpose shipped there to become dinner. We meet Zoe fairly early in the story, and then proceed to spend the rest of it chasing after her. Zoe, you see, is comically stupid; implausibly so, even for the standards of “plausibility” that we might apply to this kind of narrative. Maybe there’s a twist in which she’s actually toying with the player character, feigning stupidity to lead her on a merry chase, getting herself in trouble over and over again so she can be rescued. This does not seem, even a little bit, like it’s a smart enough story to have this kind of twist in it.
In spite of being constantly and repeatedly presented with evidence that she is in very real danger of being killed and eaten, Zoe continuously refuses to act with circumspection or self-preservation. Despite being constantly presented with evidence that Scarlett is here to save her from this fate, Zoe is also comically incapable of trusting her. This is a damsel in distress story in which the damsel is, primarily, annoying.
Scarlett, for her own part, is simultaneously a hapless fish out of water, a saucy bimbo entirely at the mercy of her horny-for-being-killed-and-eaten impulses, and a hypercompetent action woman straight out of Kate Beaton’s Strong Female Characters comic. Her characterization, really, shifts from moment to moment to ensure the expected balance of “advancing the plot like a badass”, “being killed and eaten”, and “becoming paralyzingly horny at the thought of being killed and eaten.”
At the same time, this piece of erotic fiction seems strangely uninterested in sexualizing its protagonist. Instead it has a strange thing going on where it constantly seeks to remind the reader that Scarlett is now “old” by Cannibal Action Park standards, and in fact feels old, like at the ripe old age of (I think) 32 life has passed her by and she missed her chance to become a really nice roast. She is also witheringly horny for men of extremely dubious quality. Take for example this passage:
He walks off, and you feel a strange emotion - you can’t put your finger on what it’s called. It seems like he simply likes you for being YOU—not for what you do, what you represent, or what can be gained from you.
The man in question, I want to be entirely clear, also wants to kill and eat her. This isn’t what makes the whole thing appalling to me, however. No, what’s appalling is that he’s entirely juiceless, devoid of any apparent appeal or allure, which is generally the case for every character (male or female) that Scarlett desperately wants to bonk (and then be killed and eaten by). Listen, it’s not hard to make the viewpoint of someone in love with a cannibal murderer seem relatable; Bryan Fuller made a whole TV show about it. But this story really doesn’t know how to walk that line at all.
Much of what causes this is the story’s overall miserable prose, which really is the thing that I find most offensive about it. It is at once self-important, low in information content, and generally weak. It’s also full of nonsensical phrases and broken metaphors; reading this is like gliding one’s eyes over rhetorical sandpaper. Someone is described as “vindictive-looking”. Or their body is “ripe with consternation.” One of those pieces of prose writing that makes you feel like you’re slowly forgetting what words mean or how they’re bloated to orange zebra.
Overall, I think even a very… well I couldn’t call it earnest, but let’s say a serious attempt to meet this thing halfway does not really do it any favors. There’s quite a lot to chew through here, but not a lot of substance to it; I feel like I was promised red meat and someone served me a plate of unseasoned tofu. One out of five stars. Would not recommend a trip to Cannibal Dollywood to my friends.
