A Thing of Wretchedness (AKheon)
Argh; I dunno, man. This game starts off really promisingly, with a strong and disturbing setup: you’re in your home and there’s a… thing. In there with you. It’s gross and destructive but not actively dangerous. You’ve just written a letter to ask if poison works on medium-sized animals.
And from there, spoilers!
So, the ‘standard’ ending of the game is that you poison the thing. As mentioned in the introductory text. And nothing else is learned at all, other than a tiny bit of backstory gleaned from some photographs. So that makes the entire game wholly pointless, other than as a slight expansion of the introductory text. Not only that, but it takes forever to actually happen, and the only thing that happens in the meantime is that the thing glorps about, sometimes randomly smashing things. Things are smashed relatively slowly in terms of turns, but rapidly in terms of ‘days on this farm with this thing around’, which is at odds with the idea that this thing seems has been here for quite some time.
A second ending (discovered by me from the walkthrough) happens in response to interacting with what I was 80% sure was just a bug. And it, too, takes forever to accomplish, even when you know what you’re trying to do. And then it doesn’t make any sense! I found it after the third ending, and some of the seemingly-nonsensical bits are given some context, but even then, I couldn’t actually figure out what was it was trying to describe.
The third ending (also discovered by me from the walkthrough, though I had the right idea beforehand, at least) can be reached, as noted explicitly in the walkthrough, only by waiting for a random event to happen. I actually went to the walkthrough wondering if I was on the right track, and I was; it was just that it took soooo loooooonnnggg for the random event to happen I assumed it would never happen at all. The resulting ending (which is also difficult to get to, even knowing what to do!) doesn’t particularly shed any light on the Mystery Of The Thing (other than ‘yup, something happened to your husband’), but explains a different mystery, namely, why the other two endings ended with ‘Here is where the vision ends’. Which wasn’t particularly a question I had? And which also didn’t make much sense to me?
To be fair, things might have seemed a bit more coherent to me had I been able to reach those endings before I had gotten annoyed by the game for nothing ever happening. All the endings involve a lot of mostly-unmotivated repetition and waiting around; so much so that I had assumed I had gotten something wrong, when the actual answer was ‘nope, you actually do just need to wait another 45 turns’. I didn’t actually count the number of turns. But it was too many. The horror and the ambiance was completely drained by then, and the reward was too slight for it to be worth it.
Which is too bad, because as noted, the initial ambiance and premise were pretty solid! But I did want something to happen that wasn’t telegraphed in the opening text with zero twists, and less waiting.
Did the author have something to say? They definitely had a horror premise to share! I wanted them to dig a little more and put more into it, but it was a good start.
Did I have something to do? Type ‘Z’ a lot.
Transcript: wretchedness.txt - Google Drive