The thirstyfirst octobrial is here. Leylines are writhing beneath the earth, rainbows twisted into sickly-coloured knots. Graggly Things are gnawing at the seams of our world…
IF-authors do their bit, breaking down the borders of reality with well-chosen words to open gates through which ill-shapen worlds seep through to overlay our own…
EctoComp is here again!
~ Dying a Little (Inside) ~ (by @Encorm)
>ABOUT
Based on a true story.
You don’t say!
Amusing on the first playthrough. Intriguing on the second, when I noticed the game remembered choices from the first iteration and changed responses. Fell flat a bit when I didn’t reach a conclusion or twist after a few more rounds. Maybe I didn’t push on far enough? I think I exhausted all the responses…
Probably a good IF-author in-joke (or nervous-breakdown-inducing cautionary tale).
~ Every day I get emails ~ (by @EJoyce)
A short and poignant description of a terrifying future where support and co-operation gradually slip away day by day, where pressure to perform rises uncontrollably, where individuals are expected to do more and more with less and less resources, where conforming to professional standards and keeping up one’s mental and physical well-being are wholly the individual’s personal responsibility.
…
…wait…
…
Did I say “future” ?
Do it yourself.
As long as you give up once the game lets you for real, you’ve seen (more or less) all there is to see. Thanks for playing!
Thanks for the review! I’m glad the game seems to have gotten its point across.
~ Invunche ~ (by @hechelion)
Your friend Matilde wrote a desperate letter to you. Her baby is dead and buried… But she is convinced the child is alive, that it was taken from her. The burial was a cover-up.
Fortunately, you’re a private detective!
Invunche has a lot going for it. The setting is early 20th century South America, you arrive in a coastal town on the Chiloé Isles via steamboat, legends abound about witches and cryptids. The textual descriptions are clear, with just a hint of atmosphere. For the real moodsetting, the text is supported by wonderful grainy pictures, evocative of the time-period, and there’s a touch of piano playing in the background.
In fact, the entire package of this piece helps lift it to a higher level. The aforementioned pictures and piano, but also the presentation of the work as a travel journal of sorts, a bound booklet with clickable buttons styled as ribbons which lead to a helpful note-section, an overview of your inventory, and the game descriptions to the photographs on the left page.
Navigation works by clicking inside the photographs, and simple verbs like EXAMINE and GET are also performed by clicking on objects inside the photos.
Beautiful, intuitive, and true to the setting.
The story itself is gripping, although perhaps a bit too constrained. There were characters and locations I would have liked to read an entire chapter about, instead of just a few paragraphs. (That’s actually not a criticism, that’s saying I want more of a good thing.)
Investigating around town leads us to discover some highly suspicious irregularities, to say the least, and following through on them heightens the tension bit by bit. The author does a pretty good job of keeping the player in that grey area where she can’t decide whether this is going to be a kidnapping mystery or a horror tale.
But that’s the story… The gameplay side of things is not as strong. Although we are supposed to be a detective, we hardly get to do any sleuthing. We mostly visit the various locations and talk to people until clues and bits of story just pop up. No clever deductions to be made by the player, the realisations of the protagonist are told to us while the game deduces them for us. Likewise, despite having some really interesting stuff in our inventory, there are no real puzzles where we can use those objects. The game decides when and where to get them out. What could have been a fun little puzzle where we find out how to tackle an obstacle is reduced to clicking on said obstacle and having the game shove the solution in our faces, with a simple (and very much obvious) click on *YES* or *NO* tacked on to offer some apologetic semblance of agency.
The characters we meet during our investigations are interesting, some even intriguing (Romualdo and Amanda, most notably). I loved the snippets of background on these characters, and it was mildly frustrating (in a good way) that they always remain elusive.
I loved Invunche a lot as a sketch of the game it could be with another layer of lovingly applied polish, but I have to concede that it has many flaws in this version.
One of those is certainly the way the ending plays out. Although it’s shocking, its delivery needs work. I assume it’s meant to confront the player with the ultimate powerlessness of our detective, and her need to forcefully push away from the horrid reality she has witnessed. But there is not nearly enough groundwork in the story we read up to this point to get the player on board and empathise with the final decision of the protagonist.
Still, the story had me on the edge of my seat at times, and I got to meet a few very interesting characters in a beautiful South American town by the shore.
I enjoyed it.
I’m curious to know which of the three endings you are describing here? I’m guessing it’s the neutral one?
She just jumps on the boat and leaves, not even telling Matilde what she found.
I think that would be the “bad” ending, then. She certainly tells her what she found in the “good” ending.
It didn’t feel narratively coherent. Nothing I thought I learned about my protagonist’s personality prepared me for such an abrupt dismissal of her loyalty to her friend.
Even a bad ending should follow organically from the story that came before. This one just seemed to jump onto a whole new track where I didn’t even recognise my character anymore.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t end this way. Maybe the shock was so great that my protagonist wasn’t herself anymore, doing things that are out-of-character. But then I, as a reader, should feel that I understand her reaction, and, if not approve of it, then at least empathise with it.
Then I wouldn’t mind at all that I reached a “bad” ending. I wouldn’t even consider it bad.
A loot-fest in an abandoned mental institution turns into a ghostly rescue mission. But the protagonist’s original objective of gathering enough valuables remains in the background, giving rise to an interesting tension between altruistic and selfish motivations for PC and player alike.
The asylum itself is an ever-looming presence. The descriptions of its gloomy corridors, stripped-down rooms, and water-logged roofs summon a bogged down atmosphere, home to long-gone but lingering suffering and despair.
Within its chambers, ghosts and spectres are trapped. Despite their terrifying effect on the protagonist, they also elicit a sympathetic, caring response through the backstories we find during our search of the premises.
Obstacles are mostly quite easily overcome, at least if the player takes good care to thoroughly investigate, remembers to return to certain locations when so clued, and has a good memory (or notes) to remind her of where the relevant pieces of the puzzle are.
This ease of puzzle-solving leaves a lot of mental room for the slowly creeping atmosphere to really grab hold.
The pacing and gating of the exploration, and the tempo of unraveling the story with it, are very well handled. Blockades and bottlenecks clear up after sufficient discoveries have been made, the promise of intriguing new secrets always keeps the player on her toes, the spread of ghost NPCs through the building gives a good balance between calm(ish) investigation and bursts of adrenalin.
A panic-meter adds to the tension. If it fills up, you fail. This mechanic, too, is very well-balanced. Scary rooms and sudden noises cause the meter to creep up notch by notch, while confrontations with spectres or other sudden events give the panic an upward jolt. But there are ways to release the tension too. I particularly liked seeing my panic-meter drop down by picking a choice that seemed the more dangerous, but was actually harmless. I could feel the relief of my protagonist as their panic dropped down and my own tension fell with theirs.
Unfortunately, I ran into a lot of error-messages, small typos, and little bugs. Still, even accounting for those, I liked this game very much.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful response!
I’m rather frustrated by the error messages. The game had lots of testing, but you can never have enough, and I can see a t least a couple of places where i introduced last minute errors after my long-suffering testers had given it the green light. I’m clearly an idiot 
I look forward to fixing them all after the contest is over.
A world where a wooden log becomes an impassable barrier. The stump of a tree a house for three families. A small corner of a field a land in need of patrolling wardens.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids completely mesmerised me when I was but a wee boy and saw it on the big screen. Later, when I saw The Borrowers on television, I felt that same magic again, this time enhanced by a more fine-tuned critical eye (I think I was 17 when I first saw it) befitting a more nuanced and layered film. And of course The Bromeliad by Terry Pratchett gave me many hours of enchanted reading pleasure.
I love how stories about little folk view the whole world that I think I know so well from a completely different, yet oh so familiar perspective. A new and fresh and surprising take on all the banalities and for-granteds of everyday life.
Warden fits right in with these stories, and it’s a lot closer to The Bromeliad end of the spectrum than it is to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids !
We follow the protagonist after she comes back from a surveillance mission. Rumours about some kind of intruder at the edge of the field create a lingering background tension, even as our protagonist’s immediate focus is food. She’s starved after such a long and exhausting mission.
What follows is almost a slice-of-life episode. Engage in a bit of banter with the neighbours while also asking about more pressing matters, look for some truly filling food (more than those few measly pickles), go admire the sap-reducing kiln made out of a flowerpot "borrowed from the big-uns,…
Practically a leisurely day out and about… But always, everywhere, the unshakable feeling that something is off…
Until you find the first hard evidence that something is very much off indeed…
During your investigation into the causes of this disturbance in your normally calm and peaceful corner of the field (except for the occasional wasp or badger, but your people have their ways to get rid of those…), there are obstacles to get around or across or over. Mostly in a typical text-adventure manner, but always with that bit of extra imaginative giddiness of being a miniature bugfolk in a world of giant pumpkins and huge looming berry-bushes.
The story slowly unfolds, and it’s a pleasure to keep guessing about the nature of the threat that is creeping up between the lines of the narrative as much as it is showing itself more and more in bits and pieces of evidence around your corner of the field.
I loved this game.
I’m actually early with this review. I only played one of two mutually exclusive paths through the game. I fully intend to play the other one too, but I realised that it would probably have to wait until after EctoComp. Since the one playthrough I did was already a full experience, and since I definitely wanted to praise Warden: a (bug)folk horror in public on my review thread so others would want to check it out too, I decided to gush about it before playing the second path.