In this thread I plan on doing reviews of the different games in Ectocomp! Since I’m in the English La Petite Mort, division, I’ll wait to do full reviews of those until after the comp or until it’s mostly over.
12 Likes
Dual II: Cyclic by DissoluteSolute
This sounds like it was almost a La Petite Mort game, as it was finished in 5 hours, but I’m glad the author took time to finish it, because it feels like a complete product.
This is a cyclic series of poems presented on a yellow background with black text. Due to the weird way Itch frames work, I had to download the game to be able to see it properly (if the author sees this, I suggest using the ‘enable scrollbars’ and ‘click to open in a new window’ options).
This is a poetical work of horror, with the poems blending explicitly horrifying things (monsters, death, etc.) with relatable foibles of humanity like family squabbles or employment woes.
I liked the way each poem flows into the others, and I like the variation in interaction. Some poems play out with slow-displayed text (all of which were thankfully faster than my reading speed). My favorite poem in the cycle, Monstrous beauty of curses, uses a kind of accretive poetry where the lines and words expand as they’re clicked on.
Overall, the writing here is very descriptive and the game felt interactive and polished. I found some of the topics relatable, but I’m more intrigued by the mechanics and the inter-connections.
5 Likes
Thanks! (Now I feel sheepish for assuming everything would ‘just work’)
The idea was that the links and slow-display text create a rhythm beneath and sometimes contrasting with the rhythm formed by the poem’s lineation (e.g. creating a differing emphasis between “cursed them so” and “curse them so” despite the surface repetition) as well as using carousel-type links to “illustrate” the use of kenning-like and juxtaposing structures.
ETA: This is not to imply that it has to be read in that way, nor in any particular way whatsoever, nor that any reading should necessarily take account of this.
4 Likes
Thanks for the explanation, it enhances my experience of the game!
1 Like
Detective en habitación cerrada
This was a tricky game for me! It’s a Spanish-language parser game that uses a lot of wordplay and clever phrases. I also had some trouble with the parser occasionally (which is normal for me when playing a game not in my native tongue). I’ve attached a transcript if anyone wants to see me struggling to get even the bad ending (I also decompiled the game to get some help).
You play as a private detective, but, as you are a ‘detectivo privado’, you can only examine yourself! That’s an example of wordplay that I didn’t quite get as a foreigner; I assume ‘privado’ has a dual meaning between the english word ‘private’ and a meaning of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ or something.
You are alone in a locked room with nothing but a photo of yourself, a pistol, some handcuffs, and a cushion. But, as the game tells you, you can only examine yourself, and you need a crime (in the form of a cuerpo delito), a client to contract you, and a criminal!
I eventually discovered that the key to progressing was to sit on the cushion and to look at the photo (possibly needing to meditate first). Once I did that, the game became complex and I was able to interact with a lot more things.
Like I said, I received a bad ending in the end. Some things are on a timer, and it looks like I was caught up in a bad end, but I liked the clever concept of the game and enjoyed playing. It was funny and mind-bending, and I was impressed by the concept and story.
transcript.txt (39.8 KB)
6 Likes
Thank you very much for the good review!
I was not sure if I could submit this game because I had a lot of doubts about the concept and, afterwards, I had to cross a hell of bugs that almost drove me mad.
As you said, the main idea is based in a wordplay. “Privado” in Spanish it is used also for “propiedad privada” also, or “sector privado” as opposed to public, (as in English I suppose) so the stupid joke here is having a detective so private that he can’t deal with the outside word. I thought it could be fun an a manageable idea to design a Petite Mort. I was wrong because that idea grow to be so complex for a month that I was on the verge to give up.
The game happens in the same universe as my first parser game: Esbozo de feto investigando crimen.
If someone needs a hint I will be pleased to help.
Thank you very much!
8 Likes
Thanks for making it, I think it was really creative!
1 Like
El Sueño del Caracol
This was the next randomized Grand Guignol game I got. This one is interesting: a smooth and polished, mostly-linear adaptation of a short, sad, romantic movie called Schneckentraum or El Sueño Del Caracol (both meaning Snail Dream). It’s about a girl who is enamored with a boy and follows him to a bookstore, meaning to ask him out, but she’s too embarrassed to do anything but buy a book. Day after day she comes to see him, amassing a small pile of books.
It’s a good story, and I can see why they wanted to adapt it. There are a few branches early on to ‘opt out’ of the story, but it is otherwise a straightforward retelling of a touching story. It reminded me of the song Jueves by the group Oreja de Van Gogh.
I also wanted to add that the styling and images from the movie chosen for the game helped contribute to the atmosphere.
4 Likes
Loveless and Listless
(Note: I had to play this in Firefox for it to load).
This is a long videotome game with custom characters and a variety of backgrounds. It is mostly linear but has some important choices and uses of options near the end.
The beginning was ambiguous enough that I had a lot of different potential scenarios in my mind. It started with characters named Thirsty and Kill who host a TV show called Love it or List it (connected to the name of this game itself) who are talking with someone named “Cont.”, and I thought it could possibly be like SCP 2030 “Laugh is Fun” (game show where people are murdered) or a more philosophical game or a continuation of a long-running series of visual novels that I didn’t know. It really did feel like the game assumed I knew who these people were or who they were referencing. It wasn’t until I had played for ten or fifteen minutes that a more clear picture emerged (especially when I realized this was connected to the GUTS series of games, a great collection of short IF with interesting interactivity and bizarre stories). And I’m just now realizing that Cont. must have stood for Contestant.
What it comes down to is that we have a lesbian couple named Franzine and Eiric who have reached a doldrum in their relationship where each thinks the other hates them. Eiric gets to make the decision to stick with Franzine or date someone else.
In the meantime, each of them spends time with one host. Franzine gets remodeled, constantly worrying that she’s unchangeable and can’t be fixed in the process of trying to get fixed to bring back Eiric.
Eiric goes on to meet three other people. The first one I went on had nude images, which I would usually stop playing for, but the art style renders it less erotic and more as a sign of vulnerability. The story at this point is rough and sad, showing the awful reality of cheating (in this case, with an asexual person). The other dates aren’t much better.
In the end, it’s a dismal picture for the couple. The ending I chose in hopes of change and a better future did not result in what I hoped for but is completely realistic for the story being told. It also jibed completely with my experience of the 30’s-40’s dating scene.
Overall, I became engrossed in the story and in imagining the feelings of the two protagonists. Despite my initial confusion and my haunting feeling that I’m lacking the background of the setting, I felt like this game had something to say about the human condition that was valuable to experience.
5 Likes
I haven’t played this one yet but from your description it sounds like it’s based on the property show Love It or List It (down to the segments where one partner investigates remodeling while the other is shown possible alternatives they could have instead). “Thirsty and Kill” sounds suspiciously close to “Kirstie and Phil”, the first names of the hosts in the UK version of the series.
7 Likes
When the TV decides to Murder your Girlfriend - The Game
This game is based on a book by the same author.
It’s written in Gruescript, and is one of the better Gruescript games I’ve played; I didn’t encounter any bugs or missing descriptions.
You play as a young man with the ability to read the minds of appliances (or at least communicate with them) and to see the hideous tentacles coming out of those machines. You are convinced that your girlfriend’s TV is out to get her, while she’s convinced that you’re being a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
You have to get advice/help from all the appliances in your apartment and in your girlfriend’s as well, devise a plan, and take down the TV!
The story is amusing, and in general felt paced well. I was surprised by how readily helpful Amanda was given the issues we had at the beginning of the game.
Puzzles are engaging while being fairly straightforward; if you just explore everywhere and carry out requested tasks you can win pretty easily.
5 Likes
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
This is a Larry Horsfield game, and his games follow a pretty specific pattern. There are 32 games listed on IFDB and 20 listed in-game as part of the series this game is in (and side-series). Larry is a prolific author of large games; if an author’s work was measured by the total sum of all moves necessary to win all games, he might be near the top (this game, while large by usual standards, is comparatively small, requiring only a few hundred moves rather than the thousands of some of his other games).
Like the others, this is an ADRIFT game, and it shares with them the classic opening castle setup that I now have memorized (a suite of rooms where extremely important items must be found by looking under beds or, a favorite place, on the mantelpiece of a fireplace), a building layout of east-west hallways connected by vertical stairs, the dungeon in the middle of the bottom floor, a long row of dungeon cells (which I was amused to see were being refurbished into guest rooms). Then a portal to a faraway land where we wander through a forest, town and castle.
I followed my normal protocol of playing as far as I can (in this case, I got to the dungeon with the ringbolts and got stuck) and then using the walkthrough for the rest. The game (as it says in the opening screen) requires you to frequently look on doors or at parts of the room not in the initial description (like walls or roof beams). That’s not unreasonable, but there are dozens or hundreds of rooms each with a lot of furniture. I went through tons of rooms looking at each door and closing each door and looking under every bed and every table. I later discovered my error was that I should have, in one specific room, looked behind a door.
Deviating from the walkthrough can cause problems. I got a pop-up ADRIFT error when I tried to DROP ALL because I had been carrying a non-droppable item since the beginning of the game (the fossy whereas the walkthrough had instructed me to put it in my pocket. Similarly, I couldn’t CLEAN or RUB a tombstone, I could only CLEAR the IVY on it. The games are completable without the walkthrough, as in other ways they are eminently fair (most areas don’t have much available so you can exhaustively search everything), it just requires quiet patience, a sense of enjoyment from trying different parser commands to discover the right ones (a VERBS list is helpful) and the willingness to try very many unhelpful searches while waiting to find the rare diamonds in the rough where it is valuable.
None of this is meant as criticism for the author to follow; with 20 games into the series and decades of stories in the universe, it’s clear this is a labor of love that will be made exactly as the author wants. It’s just a general description for players new to the Lazzahverse. I’ve never regretted playing these games, and generally give them fairly high ratings, because they do have a sense of adventure and of a living, evolving universe.
5 Likes
Mititz
This is a Spanish language game with an engine that reminds me of the engine Moiki, but I’m not quite sure what it is. (looking it up, it’s fi.js).
The idea is that your car has broken down in the middle of a forest. The last evidence of civilization that you encountered was a sign saying “Mititz”.
Trying to make it back to town, you encounter a strange and frightening sight in the woods. A chase then ensues, and you have the chance to do an inventory puzzle or two.
I wonder if the game might be unfinished, or if it just ends semi-abruptly. I escaped, and an option to huir down the road. But the game stopped right after that. It feels like it could definitely be an ending, but there might be extra content I didn’t find.
I liked the writing in this and emailed it to my Spanish teacher friend, since she’s been doing a unit on superstitions and myths.
3 Likes
Exorcist Tipline
In this game, you are an exorcist, shunned by normal people. After a compelling intro, you enter a small town with a grid-like map and spend 49 days exploring the map, hearing about ghost cases and solving problems.
This is one of the last two games not to get ratings. Once I started it, it became crystal clear why that was so. Further play only strengthened my initial impression.
This is a fantastic game that seems deadset on making it very hard for the player to experience it. It has achingly slow text; double clicking can speed it up, but even when sped up, it was still deeply slow (I’d click 5-10 times per paragraph). In a short game, that can be a moderate annoyance, but this is one of the longest games in the competition.
You have 49 days to investigate different cases. Each day you have a possibility of receiving messages on your answering machine, telling you where to go on a map. You have the option to investigate a square, do divination at a square, go to the library, ward yourself, or rest.
Cases have timers; people can just die if you’re too slow. But cases also overlap, so you’ll get urgent messages each day. But, and I can’t stress this enough, picking the wrong option wastes an entire day with no way to undo or save. Compounding this is the fact that every few nights ghosts get closer and closer to your bed and will kill you if you don’t Ward yourself. So if you pick the wrong option on a case, you waste a day, someone may die in a case you didn’t pursue, you yourself have to ward again so that you don’t die, and a huge chunk of the game has passed.
Dying puts you back to a checkpoint. There was a strange coin button on my screen that I thought picked where my checkpoints were if I clicked on it, but I later realized it was a stray sprite left over from the divination.
All told, this makes this an very player-unfriendly game. I suspect that the time never played through the full game without using cheats of some kind; this kind of thing can usually be picked up on by people playing their own games repeatedly (if it’s not fun for you without cheats, it won’t be fun for players). And I’ve seen these kinds of design patterns before; there’s a fear that players will just skim your text and lawnmower your game, so one approach is to slow down text, remove saves, add harsh consequences, obscure choices (for instance, if you pick a wrong conversation path in the game, you can die or lose a case with no undo), etc. All of this makes it impossible to speed-read or lawnmower. But there are other ways to get engagement; the game already has multiple interesting goals and engaging puzzles. Just taking away the slow text and the night time deaths would make the game way more fun.
Behind all of these barriers mentioned above, the game itself is fantastic. Great hand-made art, really good writing with distinct characters and unique plotlines, and fun coin and map-based mechanics.
Getting to the end was excruciating. I’m not sure how many people will be willing to finish this game as-is. But if there were ever a new version that at least removed the slow text timer and added at least one more player friendly feature (like saves or a limited undo feature, or a guide or walkthrough, or taking away the random deaths), then I would be able to heartily recommend the excellent parts of this game.
10 Likes
The darker side of slow text…
2 Likes
One Fifty-Nine: Drowned Secrets
This is a military mermaid exploration horror game, a genre I didn’t know existed until now.
This is also a choicescript game of around 25K words (according to the author), which can be played in less than an hour.
In it, you are a captive mermaid used by the government to carry out dangerous missions. Several divers have died in a certain area, and it’s your job to figure out what can go wrong. Your greatest tool is your voice, which can injure or soothe others.
You have to explore a mysterious shipwreck and deal with a number of frightening phenomena.
I liked the storyline and the various creatures a lot here. And there was plenty to do, like choosing what to explore first, deciding how risky to be when encountering new dangers, etc.
I sometimes found my attention wandering, including one scene mentioning a splinter that I reread two or three times. Other times I was very locked in, usually with the things unique to being a mermaid (like using the voice or dealing with the collar around your neck).
I like Jacic’s games in general but I think this one is especially good; the aquatic setting is the perfect setting for the author’s strange creatures and creepy atmosphere.
7 Likes
Invunche
This was a downloadable game where you navigate by clicking on parts of an image, needing occasional searching.
It’s a translation of a Spanish game (I found a tiny fragment of untranslated spanish early on, for ‘leave to the corridor’). It regards a legend of a local kind of monster called the Vunche or Invunche, in connection with witches.
It has three main gameplay segments: an intro on a ship, a larger village exploration section, and a short finale.
I liked the mysteries and legends aspects, and the slow unveiling of the plot was intriguing. Gameplay was generally satisfying, just clicking to each area, going through the possibilities, then following up on any directions in the Notes tab.
There might be two endings; I picked up a special item in the ship early on but didn’t use it. Actually, while writing this I loaded up my save game and tried using it but to no avail. So I wonder if more options were planned at one point but not implemented; that would make sense, as there isn’t much freedom to stray off the game’s chosen path, and most of the characters feel like they could use another scene or two for a full story arc. But the game that is here is polished, well-written, and fun.
6 Likes
This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.
It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.
Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.
You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.
I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).
This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.
8 Likes
Sparks Fly
This is a horror Twine game that plays on the fear: what if you were alone, far from society, with a man who wanted to exert complete power over you, leaving you no freedoms, nowhere to run? Also, what if that man and his family were also super messed up and wanted to mess you up, too?
This is an effective horror tale. I could feel the helplessness of the protagonist and the disturbing nature of the family’s ‘hobbies’.
I played through twice, once super quickly to estimate length and check for content warnings and another for real gameplay. I got two pretty different endings, so there is some real freedom here (ironic, given our protagonist’s plight).
There were some occasional grammar or spelling oddities, similar to the amount I tend to have in my writing. Other than that, the game seemed highly polished.
3 Likes
I have no verbs, and I must
I was bewildered by this game when I started it. Most moves result in instant death. A lot of words in the description are bolded, but typing them does nothing. I downloaded HTML tads on my work computer in case there were supposed to be hyperlinks.
Eventually, I typed random verbs, and shout took me to a new room! Trying to figure out the connection and dying a few more times, I pondered more on the name of the game and realized what was going on.
This game has numerous strange and surreal vignettes. My favorite was a car ride with someone who has strapped knives onto all the surfaces, that was an interesting image.
The writing and the initial mystery are the two main components of the game for evaluation. Like I said, a couple vignettes really called out to me. I didn’t grasp a larger pattern or see a common thread (however, that’s pretty common for me with poetic IF, and I’ve had discussions with a few poetry authors on how poetic IF should be evaluated. But this is a rated competition, so I’m comparing to other games, including by the same author! So for me the vivid imagery and the frustrating beginning are the parts I think of the most).
4 Likes