This one didn’t really land for me. Looking at other reviews, I’m figure I’m just out of my depth: I haven’t (yet) lost any family members I was especially close to, much less one that I had a complicated relationship with, and I had to look up that “shiva” in this case refers to a Jewish mourning period and not a Hindu deity. This piece does do well at telling a grounded story, spaced with the kind of awkward contemplation that I imagine would accompany such a situation.
I guess I can try to assess it as a horror game submitted to a horror game competition. I’m not really a fan of using sexual abuse for shock value (although I’m sure that’s hypocritical somehow) but this is how the piece is structured. (I’ll note I had some idea of what it would be about going into it, plus it’s submitted to a horror game competition, so I can’t say whether it would shock.) Not in like a ‘this is problematic’ way, and it’s not like it’s actually depicted or anything, just that on a narrative level I find it distracting. The game is structured around revelations: you know from the start that you didn’t like your dad, but as it unfolds you discover that you were abused by him, your sister didn’t believe you, and her daughter was also abused by him. I think writing it like that makes it clear why this feels odd: the player character knows the first two things from the start of the game, so why don’t I?
It could be that the character is trying to forget and the events of the game force those memories back up, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that it is more about evoking shock in the player. Maybe it would make more sense from the sister’s perspective—who would have to decide whether to believe the player character—or if the game was more about discovering what happened to the niece. The gameplay seems to want to be a parser, since much of it involves moving between rooms and investigating objects, but instead we’re trapped in Ink. The only consequential discovery is an ominous drawing in the niece’s room, which is interesting… but that’s only a brief moment.
None of these are necessarily problems. Like I said, clearly it did land for others, so I don’t want to suggest there was a strictly better way of telling this story. But I think this is why it didn’t quite connect with me. The characters and their environment were not so vivid as to make me feel like I really knew these people. I mean, you get to choose the player character’s gender for some reason, suggesting they are meant to be something of a blank slate so I can imagine how I would feel in such a situation. But I don’t know!
It’s not like I hated it, to be clear. Lots of things don’t connect with me and that’s fine. I guess usually I fall back on thinking about how the story works mechanically in those instances, and in this case I felt like the mechanics didn’t really support the story. EJ’s review notes “there’s an uneasy sense of non-resolution” and I think that’s where it’s most effective: the situation turns out to be worse than you realised, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. There could easily have been a version of this which wastes time in a different direction with investigations and confrontations, but it does know where to stop.
It’s funny, I didn’t have the impression that the PC’s abuse was meant to be a shocking reveal rather than just something the PC was semi-avoiding thinking about and they and Miranda were talking around, but on further consideration that’s really because it’s in the content warning, and even a framing of “this content warning contains spoilers, do you want to see it?” might have come off differently. Which raises questions about how much we should consider the content warning as part of the text of the game, because it’s true that the game is otherwise not up-front about the abuse.
(The stuff with the niece plays more as a reveal regardless, but I think “ah, it’s worse than I thought” feels pretty different to the fact of abuse happening at all being a twist.)
Yeah, I somehow managed to click play without reading the content warning, so while I had some idea it was going in a heavy direction from how people had talked about I didn’t necessarily know exactly what to expect.
And it could be that it wasn’t intended to be much of a reveal, but that’s how it came across to me - from the start you are made to wonder why the characters feel antagonistic towards the dead dad, and then the key beats of the story involve the player (if not their character) finding out why.
I meant to play this earlier after Bez commented that we had coincidentally both used Videotome ADV for our entries, but it’s taken me a while because I tend to get to stuff while eating lunch, and I had a feeling this piece might put me off my appetite. Having finished it now, I am intrigued why we both chose the same engine: in my case I was drawn to this version of Videotome because its format displays three lines of dialogue (or narration) at the same time, and that made for an interesting way to pace the script. I can see something similar emerging here, although the reasoning could also just be that some of the lines of narration are longer than would fit into the other formats. It works anyway; this way you’re forced to digest the story steadily, unable to skim a whole passage at once, but nor to quickly move on from the previous line. It lingers. There’s some beautifully ill-fitting background music too. Chill out! We’re all having a great time.
Okay, so… at a loss for how to assess this, let’s once more fall back onto “is this an effective horror story?” Well, we’re back into ‘viscerally uncomfortable’ territory, as people (or frogs, Muppets, or rocks judging by my childhood nightmares) being consumed has long been perhaps the most distressing image possible to me. (Wait, should I admit that on a public forum?) Death makes me uncomfortable anyway, but something about a body being not just killed but destroyed… eugh.
This story takes that disturbing concept and juxtaposes it with a narrator who has the exact opposite perspective to mine. That premise is also pretty much the whole extent of the story, so it mainly builds tension from whether me as a reader is going to continue putting up with it. I mean, I’ve written about vampires before, which is a kind of cannibalism… With those stories I wanted to ask the question “do you sympathise with this character?” and keep asking it, and this feels like a similar case. Except the narrator isn’t really asking for sympathy; they’ve made their choice, indeed have apparently achieved true satisfaction. So maybe the question is more like “do you think there is something wrong here?”
Admittedly, there is another layer to this story. It turns out the events leading up to the protagonist’s predicament involved them making a deal with their boss not to screw up a big assignment, then screwing it up. (I now wonder if my brain believes someone is going to eat me every time I make a mistake. Would explain a lot.) The question is raised of how much this was a choice: the narrator is adamant they didn’t fail deliberately, and while both were aware of their desires to fulfil each other’s predilection, it doesn’t seem like there’s much freedom to reject the deal. Maybe that’s just part of the fantasy, but (say it with me) this is a horror game competition. This is a world where your boss can eat you if you fail to deliver on productivity and as far as anyone knows you liked it. Can I call that biting satire?
“You can’t remember who you are or what you should be doing.” Yeah, happens to me all the time. In a funny thematic continuation, we’re once again from the perspective of a happy phantom. The furniture-based manipulation of this game though gives it an interesting implied concept: we are not so much playing as a ghost but playing as a haunted house.
Possibly by sheer luck I managed to pick the option right off the bat that made it immediately apparent what was happening, and then managed to win on my first playthrough. It seemed like a good puzzle though it seemed nonobvious what to do in the locked room; you’re given options in terms of direction, but then you’re told the treasure is in the middle of the room. Still, an impressive amount of detail for an LPM entry. I’m really tired so I can’t remember what else I wanted to say.
Surprisingly effective use of timed text to play with suspense and (lack of) agency. It does have a strong rhythm as my eyes adjust to the light.
Dual II: Cyclic
This one, then, is the inverse: more interesting text, less well-executed presentation. If I find myself hitting cmd+0 just to make sure, the text size is probably wrong, although I have to assume it’s purposeful. I imagined the first poem was from another perspective after the events of Rhythm and I liked how each one linked dreamlike to the next. Still I found it impossible to keep up with the timed text and I thought the most effective poem was the last one (“Monstrous beauty of curses”) which dropped the timings and did some interesting and unique things with cycling links. Hypertext is not dead!
…Grind exceedingly small…
I’m not going to review all of these because my stomach hurts but I was curious about this one. It’s wonderfully visceral and I quickly stumbled my way through. Like many effective parser games, this is about exploring a space, and its first and most important question is what sort of space that should be. Which is an interesting observation; I haven’t made a parser game because I haven’t had a really good idea for one, but maybe I’ll try asking that question. After all, there are spaces everywhere.
Well, speaking of agency, here is a game where you have none, or at least I don’t have time to find the ending where you do. I guess in the same way old-school horror stories might be dark twists on romantic tropes, this feels like a subversion of a certain familiar IF format: you get to customise your character in meaningless ways, you meet a dazzling love interest, and you get to choose how you make your way through the story!
Except the character customisation is just there to taunt you personally, you are too busy itching for a run button to figure out why you’re supposed to want this guy (it’s a nice touch that you can’t customise him; indeed he is trying to customise you, so perhaps what’s really happening is that he is the protagonist and you are beholden to his agency), and to top it all off all the choices are on his terms and you are very much trapped.
Suffice to say I did not enjoy my night with the Frankensteins and I am reminded why I do not drive, let alone late at night alone in the woods…
Also there were a lot of typos. But maybe that’s part of the parody?
I think I’ll leave it here[1] because this feels like a dream you might have after playing all the other entries in the competition. It’s halloween night and the trick-or-treaters (no doubt resplendent in wordplay) are breaking down your door; your attempts at playing a normal parser game are foiled as you begin to realise something is wrong; you are something other and you didn’t even realise; and at the end you’re forced to wonder if you have used the services of a haunted washing machine. Hey, it even involves a walking man—or rather, that’s the action you don’t get to take…
I intend to review Doctor Morben’s Asylum and Diary of a Drowned Girl when I have more time postcomp ↩︎
The framing device seems to be an important feature of the classic ghost story: presumably, part of the atmosphere comes not just from the haunting but from imagining someone telling it with urgency in their eyes in an understated setting, someone who is perhaps a little haunted from it themselves. Maybe the ghost isn’t that spooky, but if someone insists it was you might be inclined to believe them.
This is a bit like an IF version of that. You hear the story and then you’re made to live it. Like with a few other parser games in this comp, there’s a sense of intrusion on expectations, an adventure interrupted and unfulfilled. But whereas those games suggest a corrupted adventure that has already happened, here you find your future prevented. But then what were you going to do anyway? Run?