Violent Delights
You have to admire the cheekiness, in a competition where you only have two hours of review time, to force you to wait an hour to play the in-game game. But it’s less of a prank than a thematic subject. As you progress through the glitchy creepy pasta of a game, with its increasingly miserly timers before crashing, an NPC asks “Right now, in this moment in time with your attention on these questions and the gradually diminishing timer, do I own a stake of your mind?” It’s a quite different take on the player-game dialogue. There is a bit of commentary on the UK’s history of censorship. Not just the initial inability to distract yourself while waiting, or the increasing shift to analogue hackery to be able to view objectionable content–when I hit review time I had managed to bypass “child protection” locks that extended well into the mid-20s. I’m sure I didn’t see everything, but what I saw was really great.
Q: When I was in the first, basic kindergarten level, I somehow managed to walk into hell, and only realized afterwards that this was a later section. Was this intentional, or a glitch?
The Transformations of Dr. Watson
After discovering a murder, Watson is attacked by the killer, and his consciousness jumps between different animals (it didn’t seem like there was any particular reason why) as he tries to convey the murder to Holmes. This is more gruesome than the premise might suggest, as each form is summarily executed. I found the AI-generated illustrations a little creepy, and the fact that they sometimes did not match the text description detracted from the experience. Perhaps text styling would have gone further than illustrations.
Valley of Glass
Sometimes fairy tales will saunter right past years’ worth of time. This explores one such lull in the story The Black Bull of Norroway, as the protagonist waits seven years for a pair of shoes in order to continue her journey. You play her stuck. The prose was gorgeous, and I liked the idea of this game a lot. Given its length (only a few turns), I think it would have been strengthened by really painting every edge of what is available, such as replacing default commands. I also had to infer that the blacksmith’s was in the village, because it wasn’t a mentioned building.
One Step Ahead
It’s so tempting to have Chat-GPT do all your schoolwork–or, well, I’ve never personally thought this, but the second-person protagonist of One Step Ahead does. They gradually cede all control to their AI assistant, until they’re no longer allowed to make any choices (If only I’d asked the robot to be more careful what I wished for!). Though spurning the AI nets a game over for poor grades, so it seems like they never had a choice to begin with. I felt at least a little sorry for them. On one page there is a “…?” link which leads to a completely blank page, unsure if that was intentional.
A Winter Morning On the Beach
My mother-in-law is into getting her 10,000 steps in, so Winter Morning presents a familiar dilemma with the elderly character’s medically-mandated stroll along the beach. I thought the hybrid parser/link format was really neat and played smoothly. Unfortunately, after several attempts I couldn’t figure out how to finish this one. A seagull poops on you if you wait for too long (I’m not sure if it’s random, it seemed like 3-5 turns, not very long). I eventually resorted to having the poor guy book it N, N, N, N, deep breath, S, S, S, S, deep breath… which didn’t feel like it was in the spirit of the thing. In the end, my seagull pursuer was inescapable.