I have sinned so I must repent. For every reply a thread tagged “ai” gets, I will review another game in this year’s EctoComp. I will also be experimenting with discussion questions in the hopes of sparking discussion.
a walk in the hallways
This is a creepy little piece with a pleasantly sarcastic tone. It’s very bog-standard horror, but it’s also very conscious of its format - if you try to go back from your starting point, it suggests you feel lost even though you haven’t gone anywhere, which seems appropriate for how navigating in IF often feels a little discordant. The aim here is a delicate balance and it pulls it off nicely by limiting the scope. I did a writing exercise the other day where the task was to take a mundane cute thing and describe it in a way that makes it scary; this feels hewn from the same vein. There’s nothing here that you wouldn’t find in a regular house, but it’s wreaking as much spookiness as it can out of that setting, evoking a nice imaginative-kids-play feeling. I played through twice and both endings were fairly abrupt and unsatisfying, but it’s La Petite Mort, so c’est la vie. But what do you think? Did the limited vibes work for you?
Nice contemplative, descriptive piece with memorable imagery including frozen blood and running from your own body. Choose-your-own-adventure in the hybrid choice/roleplaying sense where you’re encouraged to reflect on and decide what sort of character you are, that most of the backstory that contextualises the events is playing out in your mind, bringing up your own memories. You’re given a little more to work with than some stuff I’ve played in that vein which makes it work quite well I feel. It’s more about the other characters, but they’re there to give you space to think about why you might want to run away to an island. The horror comes more in the nightmarish imagery that haunts conversations and the insomniac air - or I guess to bring it all together, the horror is in the past and we’re (avoiding) recollecting what we’re running from.
I agree, the choices here, even just the word choices regarding your backstory, really worked for me, and that doesn’t always click. I’m glad to see someone else agree that these felt more substantial than some, I wondered if maybe I’ve just not played enough similar games to have a sense of what’s out there.
Sometimes I wonder if the highest purpose of fiction is to become an idiom, a reference point for a particular situation, a long-winded way of quickly summarising a complex topic. This can’t be true because it has little to do with the actual experience of reading a story, but it’s interesting to think about what it takes for a story to ascend in this fashion. Every day I get emails is one of these stories, I feel - at least, in the week or so since I played it I’ve come pretty close to outright suggesting people play it as a reference point to understand a particular phenomenon.
Much as with last year’s Die Another Day, Joyce presents us with a real situation with the wording twisted slightly to make it apparent how horrifying it is. “Teams are getting smaller,” was the wording used at my university last week by a guest speaker from the digital marketing world, “People are taking on more work than they used to.” I asked what future there was for us students hoping to break into one industry or another. The best he could offer was that most of the problems with the industry right now aren’t AI’s fault, and that maybe we could use AI to automate the mundane stuff and free more time for… “creative work.” Not having the experience of what that’s like in practice, I thought of this game then: the disappearing coworkers, the way the whole game itself consists of interactions that could easily be automated, the boss who uselessly suggests Copilot as a solution. It captures in snappy idiom how precarious the whole system feels, how comically delusional its proponents sound, and how much it hurts the people who are made to deal with it. Even the title sounds exhausted: Every day I get emails. Every day. Understanding isn’t the problem; the people who understand AI the least are its users and unpaid (?) marketers.
I should’ve taken more notes on that lecture, but I wrote a poem instead. So I didn’t mention the game in the end, but hey, maybe I should track that guy down and send it to him on LinkedIn. That’s networking, right? Or can I just automate that?
This too is an idiom, maybe moreso than it is a game. As someone else commented, it would be slightly more effective if the visited link colour was overriden. And that’s about all there is to say.
But what do you think? What did this story remind you of?
This is incredibly high praise. Thank you for the review (and I’m so sorry you have to deal with the prospect of entering the workforce amid this whole mess)!
Not exactly an answer to your question, but I was intrigued by the multiple different endings; while playing, it felt like my choices didn’t really matter, because ultimately every playthrough led to the same place. But after a few replays I realized that what’s on the other side of the door changes depending on how you get there, so then suddenly it felt like it was important whether I charged straight ahead or stopped and took a break or tried to go the opposite way first. Unless the endings are just randomized, in which case, joke’s on me!
Well, when I realised there was another Decker game in the comp by two familiar faces from the Decker community, I figured that had to be my next stop. In this case, it’s a short piece by BenyDanette that’s been translated by FloconSugar for the comp. Typically for Decker pieces, it explores new ground for the medium, and typically for Beny it knocks it out of the park. This is a stylish (make sure to click the eye at the start to pick a colour scheme! I went with Neon) hybrid parseresque game reminiscent of the Texture engine but… off. Multimedia elements are limited this time to an eye that watches your cursor and a soft eerie Have a Nice Life backing track, but there’s plenty of style still in the presentation of the text itself. It’s like a bloodstained scrapbook.
The title caught my eye from the start. You do indeed play as something nonhuman, but the title remaining in French opens up another way of reading it: nonhuman, or inhumane? When you are surrounded by gasmask-wearing soldiers, you must ask who is really the monster in this equation. The answer, of course, is nobody.
Texture but off: you don’t pick from a selection of verbs that exist separately from the text; you salvage verbs from the text and apply them to things you can see. This is, like, genius. Immediately you have the sense of being this creature cowering in an abject alleyway, reaching out for a world it doesn’t fully understand, feeling it all intensely, breaking things, regretting it. More than that, you cast that intensity back onto the world, setting cars into flames and making soldiers cry, dreaming of fading the sun. Just as the boundaries between text and action are blurred, so too are the boundaries between self and environment. How does that make you feel?
Edit: I forgot to mention I played through this three times, since I missed some attempted interactions by accidentally advancing the story (another way this is pleasingly distorted from expectations) and the end screen encourages you to try again. I’m actually not sure I recommend playing again, though, as it turns out the game is more linear than it may appear.
For some reason I felt moved to read this story out loud as I played it. There’s a pleasing rhythm and shape to its prose, so I think I made the right choice. This is a game written in spring, set in summer, and released for a notably autumnal competition, so already there’s a sense of being displaced in time. I was taken back to too many days spent in university dorms, which can (particularly in 2020) easily feel like a mundane prison of perpetual discomfort and repetitive actions. We all find our ways of breaking from the routine, of getting a little hit of control, even if that means curling our lips around the yawning void of entropy. This game renders it in the image of throwing increasingly significant items down a well - a childhood horror, at least to me, since I have an anecdote of throwing a bubble machine down a well in our back garden at the age of about three, and realising “oh… that’s gone now.” This game escalates up to a similar ‘it’s too late’ climax - cleverly, since the description otherwise appears to spoil what it’s building towards - to complete its fable without overstaying its welcome. Could make for an interesting comparison with Non-humain, since it’s in the same category of horror where the player character is the horrifying thing, but the two otherwise look very different.
But what do you think? Would you have gone further?
In fiction, love is a blessing, a peaceful eternity. But as this game says, “in real life, things happen.” You can fill in the rest.
This is a reflection on a first love gone horribly wrong. The text prominently features the song “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane, which was my favourite song as a child and a band I’m still fond of… There was a trailer for a TV series a few years ago which did a dramatic remix of it that placed creepy emphasis on the line “you’re gonna let me in”, and this piece feels much in that vein. Because it’s a sweet and simple song that can easily be twisted: somewhere only we know is, necessarily, isolated from anyone else who might be able to help.
I admit to finding the ending a little confusing. I think the idea is that you’re supposed to reflect on the earlier romantic scenes which now seem suspect - but I didn’t really see them as innocent the first time around, and there doesn’t seem to be any extra unnoticed detail added in the repeats. That may just be my own circumstances making me presuspicious though! And given how it does end, there is something haunting about being forced to reflect on those memories for the rest of your life. Can you savour the happiness, or were they always bloodied, or are they now?
The game has a mechanic that lets you go back to each segment of the story from a menu, which would be neat but seems a little unnecessary for a game of such a short length. I tried to use it to aid with my review but it didn’t seem to work, so I just started again in a private tab.
But what do you think? Did you find this haunting or sympathetic? What would you have done? Is it too late? Aah!
I was excited to try this one, having long been intrigued by the possibilities of multiplayer IF. This is the first one I’ve actually tried, possibly because it’s a Petite Mort game that only takes twenty minutes to play (YMMV) and because the multiplayer mechanic isn’t too complicated - you don’t have to sync up with any online service; instead you just exchange codes at regular intervals. I’m inspired.
I played with Naarel and jwalrus, and it turned out the three of us were advisors to competing kingdoms. I immediately decided to be and remain evil, whereas they both decided to play it reasonably, so… I won!!! The game is impressive work for four hours: the gameplay is clever and the description is as vivid as it needs to be. Subtlety does not exist in this world, but there are some nice turns and observations: how your greed is driven by a need to be the strongest nation on the playing field (so whose fault is it really?), how a pretty marvel soon turns to utter addiction (for them or you?) as you sell the answer to problems you’ve caused. “To not close the wounds, but to rush into them, to fester inside, an infection, one so deep that if it were removed the shock would kill the body.” How is it we live in a world where people talk about reanimating simulating the dead as an idle curiosity?
I guessed near the end that we were headed for some form of grey goo scenario, which of course is imaginable from the title, though there is a bit of a twist in how your character winds up at the end. The central conceit is of a magic slop machine which requires people’s souls in order to generate a simulation of one, a fantastical premise that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with anything going on in the real world. The game escalates the idea of this nihilofascism to its absolute extreme conclusion, emphasising the point of that old saying about conservatism protecting an in-group at the expense of everybody else. But of course it feels different when you’re the one making these choices. How much agency do we really have in this situation?
Experimentation after completion reveals the game has more to say with its structure. There’s something about the tyranny of endings here: if nobody chooses to take the evil route, the game is a stalemate and all of you will keep repeating the same turn until one of you gives in and slops. And that’s a clever encapsulation of the artist’s dilemma. You can stay honest and true to yourself, stay out of it all, but that means you have to keep working and suffering for the rest of your life. Or you can end the world. It’s up to you.
The ending suggests playing the author’s other games: “Most are just as depressing.” I have fond memories of last year’s 39 Trillion and 1, with which a comparison could probably be made: both are about selling your soul in some way. The scale is the main difference (not counting form or aesthetic) - perhaps this time last year the threat didn’t seem quite so all-encompassing. I am right here racing to outrun the ever-growing slick of arguments about slop, after all.
But what did you think? Would you cave under pressure? What is it worth to be free anyway?
Well, that’s my nightmare. It’s difficult to discuss too much without giving it away; you kind of just need to play it for yourself. Realising what’s going on made me go “huh?” then “oh” then “no!!!” Definitely fits into the viscerally uncomfortable category with very good use of its format. It’s got a shrinking feeling as you try desperately to play this like a normal parser game while it all inescapably escalates. Good, nasty stuff.
But what did you think? Has this ever happened to you?
(Meta note: since there is another AI thread and not only that but someone has mentioned fucking HP, I will review a Grand Guignol entry to make up for it.)
Given my own history with capital-L Laundry—from 189 scrobbles and counting of Allie X’s “Fresh Laundry” to my short-lived hacking career—I was excited to try this one, even though I never played the original Ghost Hunt. It turned out to be an extremely brief experience for me as I managed to figure out the correct answer on my first try (uh, i googled the flowers); the hardest part was working out what it wanted me to type to examine the washing machine. So this is a cute little puzzle that put a smile on my face with an intriguingly silly setting. Well, I say silly, but given the things that tend to happen in my life, it really wouldn’t shock me if I encountered an actual haunted washing machine.
There’s a lot of questions raised, if I’m honest. We don’t get any dialogue or even a description of the ghost, so we’ll have to deduce any information from the mechanics of the puzzle. The washing machine itself seems incidental—the location the ghost was trapped—but perhaps we can imagine that it fled to a utility room for a reason. Leaving aside the mystery of how exactly the machine was dragged to the graveyard, there’s the mystery of why these gravestones hold clues to answering the puzzle of how to send off this particular spectre. An extraordinary set of circumstances—unless this is exactly what the ghost wanted. After all, when the puzzle is solved, the ghost is released to attack the player. Which means the graveyard was a trap. Which means whoever manufactured the washing machine is presumably in league with the ghost(s). Which tracks with my personal experience, not gonna lie.
Alternatively, the ghost just liked flowers, and was cold.
Go-Strange-Ghost Range/Dusk, Airy, Does Carry/Chez Dark Shade Ark
I played the first two of these a couple of weeks ago, so I admit to not remembering them very well. They all seem to involve somebody taking a wrong turn on halloween night and winding up in the strange world (strain Gerald) of Andrew Schultz. After getting the hang of things with Us Too in the IFComp, I’m finding these little bursts of wordpuzzling to be nice relaxing bites, and smugly got through them pretty quick and without even using any hints.
Owing to my success in the first two games, I decided to time myself for Chez Dark. (Not that it makes much sense to speedrun a word puzzle since you can’t repeat it.) Inevitably this backfired; I ended up with a time of 16m 21s, the vast majority of which was spent trying to figure out what the fuck was dicey. I was pleased with myself for figuring out that “awe flame” might sound like “off lame” in an American accent and for knowing that “ankhs” is a word, but floundered here; I even guessed “porn dicey” and still didn’t get it. Oh well.
Probably the most surreal of three extremely surreal games, though I am playing this one two weeks after the other two so I can’t remember that well. Although I’m not massively familiar with the back catalogue, Schultz seems to have got this down to a fine art at this point: I find myself scanning each passage to quickly get the puzzle prompt I need, absorbing the bizarre story along the way. There’s just enough context to justify this being more than a literal newspaper puzzle, but not too much that the text distracts from the gameplay. I think there probably is stuff I could analyse about the characters and what they go through, but to be honest I’m more focussed on the puzzles for these ones—plenty of other games if I want some meaty story to chew. A thoroughly-entertaining diversion and impressively well-implemented for four hours (hell, even outside of four hours). The pixel art here is delightful as well—definitely sets the goofy, offbeat halloween mood!
