This is an impressive game for one made in 4 hours.
It features a kind of cult or religion that has 22 members, one for each of the major arcana. You are death. One of the highlights for the game is the custom art of each member (one of which features the non-sexual nudity mentioned in the content warnings). My favorite was the high priestess, with a symbolic-looking pose.
There is also music, background images, etc. The gameplay style is Visual Novel style, with several pages of text interspersed by few but impactful choices. I only saw a few choices, and it was hard to know the outcome, but I know there are multiple endings (I got ending 2).
The story is that your cult is horrified by Halloween, when the devil’s servants are allowed to walk around unless placated by candy, so you go to a house whose owners have died and decayed in order to try to hear God’s voice on the radio.
Overall, the writing is well-done, descriptive and evocative, and the game is well-polished for being made in such a short time. My current preference is to have more agency in a story (or to be able to read more quickly for replays for endings), so I wish I had a bit more to do. The worldbuilding is done well, and I’m glad I played.
Thank you for the review, Brian! I’m glad you enjoyed! I would have liked more agency, but I just wasn’t sure where to add it. I really appreciate the feedback!
This is a game with a fun little idea for the speed-IF portion of Ectocomp. It’s hard to write a parser game at all in 4 hours, let alone a time loop, so this one is pretty impressive.
I thought at first it was set in the world of Gravity Falls, since there’s a guy with the name Old Man McGuffin that sounds like the gravity falls scientist guy, but the names aren’t entirely similar (McGuffin vs McGucket). Either way, the game has the old scientist offload a weird time-loop device on you as a ‘trick’ during trick-or-treating.
The game has a pretty big map for a small game, but a lot of it is red herrings. Once you find the areas that are ‘real’, you can piece together what to do.
This game wasn’t polished or fully descriptive (which is usual for speed-IF, including my own), but was fun and the puzzles were neat.
This is a relatively brief twine game with three endings, two bad and one good.
The idea is that global warming exposed a layer of mycelium all over Antarctica that is sentient. Scientists made super-soldiers out of it by using genetics to create human-shaped versions of the very strong mushroom material. But these mushrooms tend to cannibalize each other, so to stave off their desires, humans volunteer to be companions that the mushrooms can drink the blood of every now and then.
You volunteer to be this companion, and have to fill out some intake forms and get acquainted with the area before meeting your future companion.
The game does a good job of expressing the alienness and horror of the creatures, but I’m not sure it presents as strong of a picture of the protagonist, whose motives and actions didn’t always seem connected to each other or to my desires. Overall, the styling was nice and I enjoyed the ending I reached.
This is a fun little whack-a-mole game written in Choicescript for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol division.
In this game, you have a four-room house, with the baby in one corner and supplies and windows in all the others.
Your options are to forage for supplies, or rest, or, if zombies are approaching a window, to attack with shotgun or axe.
I passed one horde and leveled up, but didn’t pass the next horde. It didn’t seem like there’d be a lot more variety, so I didn’t replay. Overall, an interesting concept.
+Polish
-Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would play again
This is a Twine game with a neat little map in the corner showing all the rooms in a kind of maze. You navigate around with a score described as ‘Survival Chance’ which goes up or down depending on what you do.
It’s a lot like gamebooks in gameplay style, except without randomized combat. You have different encounters with people and need to pick up various keys and tokens and other items in one area to progress in another.
Story-wise, you have to go to the help desk, but you get trapped, because it’s haunted. All your coworkers are skeletons or werewolves or other wild things, and the humor is pretty goofy.
The game could use a little more polish; there were a few typos here and there, and I never really connected emotionally. But overall it was a pretty strong game and amusing while I played it. The author did add several features that improve gameplay, like the map and back button.
The Enigma of the Old Manor House by Daniel M. Stelzer
This game was made in 4 hours, but has about a dozen beta testers, and it makes sense, as it is very polished.
This is a game where you explore a dark mansion with a lightsource and a helpful notebook. You are trying to find a ghost, and have to navigate around, dealing with blocked passages and places your light can’t get through.
The atmosphere is generally creepy, especially since someone died there in the past. The descriptions of the dark areas are especially evocative.
Overall, it’s a clever game and has some heartwarming parts.
I think it could still do with a little more polish, even with the cadre of testers. That’s to be expected for most speed-IF, but it would make sense for the author to add on to it, since I could see people liking it in the future. The commands I think would be useful to have responses to include (heavy spoilers) POINT POINTER or STACK BOOKS, or X ROD.
I liked this one quite a bit. I used hints 2 or 3 times.
I never found a use for the laser pointer, and had all but forgotten about it by the end of the game. Now that you mention it, perhaps it helps you locate the ghost in the last room?
I could just THROW TARP OVER GHOST without knowing exactly where it was.
The original intended solution was to WAVE POINTER once you’ve figured out what the ghost is, but testers suggested that other solution and it made a lot more sense, so I added that one too.
This game is based on cosmic horror. You and two companions have been trapped in a shifting labyrinth for days, trying to find your way out. Tensions are rising, especially between your pushed-to-his limits friend Vlieg and your deeply-fascinated friend Tia.
The game is written using Binksi, a combination of Bitsy and Ink that uses tightly-constrained pixel art and the dialogue capabilities of Ink. You sometimes move around, running into things to talk, and other times have pure dialogue.
In the ending I reached, there was a massive shift in perspective. It was a clever concept and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it also brought a ton of profanity for a long time that honestly wasn’t that fun to me. The big twist doesn’t quite make sense conceptually, looking back, but it does make sense in terms of cosmic horror.
This game is quite complex, and I think it really shows off just what Binksy can do, for those interested in the engine.
This game is written with Twine and takes place in five acts, each of which is brief but meaningful.
You play as a ghost that finds itself in and out of existence, with the times in existence being important moments in the lives of your surviving family members. At first, there is very little you can do, but over time you develop more abilities. But it’s not really a power-based or puzzle-based game; it’s more about the story, about how your connection with the family deepens and grows over time.
The five acts vary between light hearted, dangerous, and sentimental. Gameplay mostly consists of navigating through the house, inspecting everything once, and then finding the one thing to return to to make things better. The pacing is excellent, as it does take some effort to finish each act but it never took long enough for me to feel frustrated.
The game does have some twists in it which, even though I saw it coming from some vibes in other reviews and though I’ve seen it done several times before, I did feel chills/lots of sentiment at the end, which to me means the author(s) executed the overall story with a lot of skill.
Overall, the best feature is the skill in plot and characterization.
I agree 100%. I assume it’s used to emphasize the fact that the “cosmic horrors” are immature young boys with potty mouths, but it undermined the impact of the twist considerably for me.
This is a Twine game where you have three dreams in order, over and over again, about dying.
Each dream is fairly brief, with 2-3 or 4 choices per dream. There are a lot of options, though, so it’s hard to know what to do to be safe.
Fortunately, if you explore each dream enough, you find hints about the other dreams. Phrases that don’t make sense at the time but later you look at options and go, ‘Oh, I get it now!’.
Even after playing a couple of times, I didn’t always understand why some things happened (like why the kitchen just kind of disappears or what triggers the ending for the final dream).
The writing is on-point and covers some frightening situations. I didn’t feel sucked in emotionally, maybe because I was focused on the puzzle-aspects and felt safe as it was all a dream. But it was very descriptive.
Excellent work for a 4-hour game, and a neat way to do choice-based puzzles.
This is a relatively brief choice-based game with an interface written in Ink that mimics text messages.
You are texting your mom and your friend ash, just having a regular day, when things get strange and weird. The game’s appeal is mostly based on its twist, so I won’t spoil it here.
The plot is pretty good, but the dialogue and characterization are a bit generic; it’s hard to get a feel for who the characters are, and their individuality. The texts are slow to come, which was a bit frustrating.
The UI looked neat, which seems like a good accomplishment. This game makes me think its author is really talented at web programming.
I had a lot of fun with this game. Modeled on Untitled Goose Game, your goal is to cause trouble. Specifically, you have 6 hours before the new owner of your house arrives, and you have to make the house as scary as possible before then.
It’s a cost/benefit analysis thing that requires trial and error: some actions take a ton of time but provide little benefit, others are short but trivial, some are heavy hitters. It requires some replay, but fortunately the choices are really funny and the text is enjoyable to read.
This was made in 4 hours, so it doesn’t have huge depth, but it felt complete as a game. According to my rubric:
+Polish: I didn’t see any errors, and the human-voice sound effects were really funny.
+Descriptive: The game had fun descriptions of everything.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize and that the game was both responsive and not too easy.
+Emotional impact: it was funny to me.
+Would I play again? I played through three times.
This is a speed-IF written in 4 hours or less, written using Choicescript (which is a hard engine to do speed-IF in). It features a dinner party in old Constantinople, where you, a ship’s captain, have to tell the story of a fated ocean trip that leads to the title of the game.
The story itself is bizarre and perturbing, and well done. The opening setting is also solid. Other parts of the game are a bit patchy, as is usual for speed-IF, since time runs out; the main things here are the quickly-sketched out endings and the fact that some parts of the game are written in rhyme and others are not.
Still, the story itself is very solid, and I like this setting and would like to see more. The only Byzantine/Constantinople game I’ve seen before is Kyle Marquis’s Silverworld, also in Choicescript. Overall, I’m glad I played this short Ectocomp game.
(I discuss some body horror stuff in this post, so squeamish may want to skip)
This is a speed-IF made for Ectocomp. In it, you play as a victim of a torturer who sadistically injures you.
The game is quite gory. There’s a lot of things that various games can have that makes me uncomfortable and not play, but I don’t really hear that as often from other players. So when several commenters on other websites had said this game made them feel deeply uncomfortable or stop playing, I was expecting perhaps the most horrible game ever created. With such foreboding expectations, the game itself, while still excessively gory, wasn’t quite as bad as I thought.
For one, you are a very willing and happy participant in the events. While the descriptions are written to shock and horrify, is it all that different than a C-section, or a dentist visit? I go to the dentist, and they stab the roof of my mouth with a needle and then grab my tooth with pliers and pull as hard as they can, ripping out what’s essentially a bone and leaving a bleeding cavity for weeks. So the game wasn’t quite as bad as I expected; in fact, the part that turned me off the most was the first ending which had some unexpected misogynistic language.
Overall, the game captures a rapturous tone in a way that reminds me of some of Porpentine’s work, specifically Their Angelic Understanding. The violent torture in exquisite detail reminded me of Paperblurt’s The Urge.
I don’t recommend this game in general, due to a few people having an adverse reaction (and me personally not being a huge fan of torture), but I think the craft is well-done and the writing is descriptive.