Not sure how many reviews I’ll end up doing, and they’ll probably all be short and rather informal, but let’s go! Likely to contain spoilers.
Edit: My dog stepped on my keyboard and posted this early. 
First review will thus come in a subsequent post rather than here as originally intended.
…“Short and informal,” I said. Oops 
I didn’t want to look at the content warnings for this one before playing because they were marked as major spoilers, so I asked someone who’d already played it if the dog died during the game—horror genre + missing dog in the premise gave me strong suspicions! “No,” they said, “the dog is dead before the game starts.” “Ah, okay,” I thought, “so the dog wandered off and died, and that’s why it’s missing. I can handle that.”
TURNS OUT, I needn’t have been at all worried about the dog. I cottoned on to what was happening pretty quickly based on the way Kendra and Maya interacted with the PC, combined with the title (and due to having played Amanda’s game with a similar premise from last year’s Ectocomp, The Dying of the Light). And that was when the horror of the piece settled in—both for the PC, Dolores, and for her daughter, Maya. Dolores wanders around this house, moving with difficulty, unable to track down her dog, seeing her child and child’s friend randomly packing up and acting weird when asked about it. Meanwhile, Maya is facing her mother deadnaming and misgendering her (not maliciously, but because she simply can’t remember that Maya has transitioned) and asking the same questions over and over while searching for a family pet who’s been dead for years.
There was a great player/PC synchronization going on, where, as DemonApologist’s review mentioned, I was wandering around the house feeling a little lost, unsure what to do and having trouble remembering how all the rooms connected, sometimes having nothing to do but go back to places I’d already been and ask people the same questions I’d already asked… and that’s exactly what the PC was doing, too! I love careful design like this; it throws me out of a game when I can repeat conversations, for instance, but here there was a reason the same list of questions would pop up every time I went to talk to an NPC, no matter how many times I’d talked to them before.
I liked the note it ended on, with Dolores finally seeing Maya as Maya—the player could choose to be transphobic if they wanted, but of course I did not choose that, so that moment was a good counter to the unpleasantness of having seen Maya misgendered so many times. [Edit: Seconding the suggestion from another reviewer that the misgendering be included in the content warnings.]
The Charlie hallucination was a little ambiguous to me—there was the grief, but also the implication of imbalance/issues in the relationship… I think I’d have to play again to fully understand what’s going on there.
Final note, I loved the UI color changes marking the sun going down—just like in Studio! It was also a helpful indication that I was making progress in the game, which was nice given the lost feeling I mentioned. Overall, I found this a very effective and all-too-real piece of horror writing.
This one was intriguing from the get-go—we start in media res with our narrator, Monica, inhabiting someone else’s body, saying that she’s temporarily borrowed it, which immediately raised so many questions. What happened to Monica’s own body? Why did she need/want this? How did she come to this agreement with the body’s owner?
These questions are all answered eventually, but having my curiosity satisfied quickly paled in importance next to the emotional arcs of the two main characters. In that first scene, the “agreement” Monica has with her host quickly falls apart as she wants more time, time that the host does not want to give—and the host is the one with the power, able to wrest control and push her out. We then shift POVs to a woman named Lisa, who after blacking out at her desk for three days finds herself with two heartbeats and a left hand that’s taken on a mind of its own. Lisa is entirely incurious about this phenomenon, though, either simply ignoring it or rationalizing it away.
We switch between the two, Monica in the past in her borrowed body, Lisa in the present, losing control of hers. There’s plenty of horror simply in this, in your body not being fully your own, not being fully under your control, reminiscent of some real-life disabilities. But the horror is doubled here because this isn’t just a single person losing control. If you haven’t played the game and it isn’t clear already, Monica’s borrowed body and Lisa’s misbehaving body are one and the same, and in the present-day scenes they’re fighting for control, fighting for who gets to claim not just the body but the life that goes with it.
We learn why this is happening in one of the past, Monica-POV scenes, when the concept of changelings is introduced. In this story, a changeling is a detached soul who inhabits someone else’s body and slowly takes over. In one of her brief period’s at the body’s helm, Monica learns about this phenomenon and comes to the horrifying realization that she is in fact a changeling.
Instinctively wanting to take sides in the conflict, I found myself rooting for Lisa—it’s her body, after all; Monica is an invader! But Monica still remained a deeply sympathetic character. We see her meet and bond with a woman named Vivienne in the brief space of existence she has, and we see her longing for more time to be allowed to live. And when she has her terrible revelation, it’s clear she genuinely didn’t know what was going on; she wasn’t actively trying to take over someone else’s life. And once she knows that her continued existence would come at Lisa’s expense, she makes the choice to let go, letting herself fade away.
But. In the present, Lisa-POV scenes, Monica has returned after being dormant for seven years and is desperately trying to take back control. And it’s because she wasn’t the changeling after all; it was her body all along, and Lisa is the invader. She so successfully took control that Monica forgot it was her body to begin with.
When Monica finds out what she thinks is the truth, that she is the changeling, she wishes she hadn’t: “Not knowing is always the best option. No questions mean no answers that you don’t want to hear. The only way to avoid consequences is to do nothing - to be nothing. You can always forget. Let it dissolve. Let it fade away.” This is exactly what Lisa has done—she doesn’t think about the truth, won’t admit it to herself, pretends it isn’t real. Living in denial as the only way to live with herself.
By this point, my sympathies had fully flipped—I wanted Monica to get her body back and have the life she’d been denied for so long. The player gets to choose at the end who wins, and it was gratifying to be able to give that to Monica, and see an epilogue scene showing her getting to share a life with Vivienne. An incredibly compelling story.
What else is there to do but keep on playing and writing about IF, I guess… Today, have some brief thoughts on a few Petite Mort games (spoilers!).
An Admirer by Amada Walker
Definitely spooky! “I can see you right now. I like to watch you sleep. I know you could just type ‘quit’ and walk away from your screen, but you won’t, will you?” A recipe for creepiness right there! And of course it only escalates… Some Inform default responses could be cleaned up, but for a speed-IF game, I found this super solid and effective.
An Admirer_tabithascript.txt (28.9 KB)
Rustjaw by mathbrush
Once I realized what this game was doing, I found it quite amusing. I replayed a bunch of times and was impressed with the amount of branching there was, and enjoyed seeing the encounters with different monsters play out. There was a nice variety in the endings—die, “break up”, or join your chosen monster. I found the “break up” ending especially funny, and a runner-up for the funniest moment was when your parents leave you to deal with your monster problems on your own. I also quite liked the art! The game is a little rough around the edges in some spots, but I know it’ll be cleaned up post-comp, and overall I had a good time with it.
(…Welp, I was going to do more short ones, but the next one got long again.)
A disorientating game in more ways than one—in a good way. Visually, you have the stark, bright colors of the UI, the retro Decker font, the narrow text window; then there’s the navigation, which is made literal as you click “open the door” links that lead your current PC on and on, walking down an endless tunnel or through a maze of rooms, or “go up one floor” in a virtual elevator that never ends. Then there’s the fact that, if you want to return to the main menu to continue with the next character, you have to refresh the page, which feels counterintuitive—normally, you don’t want to lose your progress! But here it’s the only way to get back.
I loved the physicality of it, captured in such a simple interface. Click a door, move to a new passage of text, repeat. You wander as the characters wander as their thoughts wander. It created a level of anxiety, especially in Uma’s section, where the thought trail meandered up, down, right, and left, making me hunt for it. I felt lost just like the three GUT members feel lost; I felt anxious and tired just like they feel. But I was also mesmerized, not wanting to miss any of their ruminations about relationships, a traumatic past, their place in the world, their future. It’s all rather sad and bleak, but again, in a good way, a way that made me feel things, that made me connect with these characters. The endless “I am tired” / “I am lonely” / “I am scared” messages when each of the three thought trails end, but you can still keep wandering. Lines like “it’s dark and wet and red. or i am.”
Then… there’s Stace. Stace, who does not have a customized UI, and who just wants to eat chips (as in French fries, not Lays).
Stace knows what’s behind the forbidden door. Stace knows what’s at the top of the tower. Stace knows what happens at the end. The world is cruel and unforgiving.
That’s why Stace eats chips.
The band she manages want to try again at making a movie, but she still thinks they’d be happier just enjoying life rather than trying to make meaning. It’s a miracle they’re alive. Don’t make it complicated.
It’s such a contrast to the slow, despairing ruminations of the three GUT members, with all their longing and seeking. Stace is acceptance. Through an over-the-top chase scene, through death, rebirth, death, and rebirth again, trips to heaven and hell (“after finding out why she has been sent to this place, the devil decides that god is problematic and heaven is cancelled” really got me), she remains unperturbed, simply continuing to eat chips. Until finally:
she herself becomes a chip. This is a relief, because it was getting kind of horrifying, and Stace eats chips for light pleasure, not existentialism.
As a chip, she herself is eaten, digested, excreted, and finally dispersed.
This, then, is true happiness: nothing to do, nothing to worry about, nothing to fear.
BUT, Stace’s entire narrative, it’s been revealed, is getting narrated to us by Jack, the self-proclaimed god who’s been responsible for her many deaths. Why should we take his word for it? Shortly after this the game ends, fittingly somehow (how else do you end a game like this?), on a faux-error screen.
Two final notes that didn’t quite fit anywhere else:
Both Gemma and Uma are told not to open a certain door, the single colored one in a sea of monochrome ones. Well, guess what I did as both Gemma and Uma. I had to know! Tillie, in contrast, wants to find a green door. In the final segment, Jack tells us the outcomes for all three:
Gemma stepped through the door and into an industrial blender. She’s only particles now. (I slurp my milkshake.) Uma entered a closet and became a stuffed toy. (I squeeze a teddy with long blue hair; it moans.) And Tillie, well, she never found the door. She got lost and starved. (I smile.)
Nooo, I doomed them with my curiosity! Not literally—see above; there’s no state tracking—but it feels like I did, because I did specifically choose to open the forbidden doors.
Second: I played this game last week, and wasn’t thinking about it at all when, last night at the grocery store doing the necessary weekly shopping, I had an urge to buy chips (Lays, not French fries, but still). When I got home, I sat on the couch and ate chips. Because chips (both Lays and French fries) are tasty, and sometimes… what else are you gonna do?
I playtested this game and then replayed the published version today. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but have some other thoughts!
First: It’s just fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments (the second-place medals alchemized into gold ), and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. And soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.
The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.
Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!
Familiar-Problems_tabithascript.txt (78.5 KB)
Thank you very much for the review! That last point is one I was somewhat conflicted about; in the end, I tried to imply that they’re not really dead—the narrator for most of the game isn’t actually the synthesis familiar but the grading familiar, for example, and the narration has strong opinions on the philosophy vs chemistry rivalry (the medals change to their “rightful gold” and “rightful silver” when transmuted) after you consume the philosopher’s familiar. But I don’t think it really came across the way we’d hoped.
Ah, I almost wrote something like “overpowering and killing (or maybe not killing, just temporarily forcibly integrating?)” but then concluded, “Nah, they’re dead” and took it out. I read the narrative voice as a distant, wry, omniscient narrator, so didn’t pick up on it being influenced by the new familiars I took on. But I appreciate that you thought about the issue and sought to mitigate it!
This one bills itself as “A short story about the day before Halloween”, and that is exactly what it is, but with layers to it—over the course of the story we see four different days before Halloween over nine years in the life of the main character, starting in 2024 and traveling backwards, the protagonist de-aging as the story goes on. The descriptions are evocative and lovely, and the first-person prose has a slow quietness to it, asking to be savored. We see scenes and moments, but the connecting tissue is left for the reader to fill in, which I found very effective as I slowly put together an understanding of both what happened in between the vignettes and the significance of the cottonwood tree under which the story begins.
“I like this tree quite a bit,” the protagonist says in the first scene. “I remember coming here last year and thinking the same thing. The curl of its branches and the smoothness of its bark. That’s why I like it.” But the story builds to a moment, nine years before, that completely recontextualizes this claim. On that day, dressed in a princess costume, the protagonist travels with her parents to a corn maze where she anticipates finding “my kingdom, my castle, my home.” And in her child’s imagination, that’s exactly what happens, traveling through the maze and reaching the castle, then ultimately, “Finding a nice spot at the edge of the kingdom. A tree that could pierce the clouds. A funny kind of curl to its branches as it waves hello. Sitting against it, its smooth bark holding me upright. My throne.”
This scene is the first time we’ve seen the protagonist’s mother; something happened to her after this, and all the days-before-Halloween in the future are colored by this memory, of magic and wonder and the mother’s presence, contrasted with the loss of it all. On that longest-ago day, the protagonist relates, “Mom told me that today I’d become a princess. […] Looking out from the highest perch of the balcony at the furthest points of the kingdom, as far as the eye can see, the world with me at its center.” But this scene ends with the line, “I was a princess again the next day, but not for much longer after that.” With the loss of her mother, the idea that she is at the center of the world and nothing can go wrong for her is shattered.
In the scenes that take place over the intervening years, the day before Halloween is cold, costumes disappoint, the protagonist’s father is disengaged, and an incident at school taints even dressing up as a princess. Finally, in the present, we see the protagonist refusing to acknowledge the meaning the cottonwood tree has for her. When she takes a photo of it, she derides herself as “Too sentimental for my own good”. Her holding back from describing the emotions she feels about her mother’s death/absence leaves readers to fill them in, which is exactly what I did, feeling for myself everything the protagonist isn’t saying, and I found that very powerful. After getting to the end of the story the first time, I immediately replayed in order to experience it again through the lens of my new understanding, and by the time I reached the ending the second time I was tearing up. A beautiful, melancholy, understated piece.
Thank you for this thoughtful review! I’m glad you found the experience effective. 
Hoping to write at least one more full review, but for now, a compilation of brief thoughts on various games! Will likely do another post or two in this format in the next few days/weeks.
Roar
The UI is cool, but I accidentally skipped several choices because I scrolled a little too far too soon. Having a button you have to click to lock in the choice before the next text will show up would be nice. Plotwise, I don’t think I’m the target audience for this, but I had fun with the obstacle course scene!
The Column
Intriguing circumstances and dilemma; I love “who can you trust?” as a plot/tension driver. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to be basing my decision on, though. I had thought that doing the ritual with either of the surviving people who went into the cave would get me killed, so I tried to guess who that would have been and avoid them. On my first playthrough, I picked the botanist for the first ritual and the archeologist for the second, which got me killed. I then went through all the other possible combos, dying every time. Finally the only thing left to try was picking the archeologist first and then the botanist, and that indeed was the answer. But I’m not sure why this worked and the reverse order didn’t?
your life, and nothing else
I enjoyed playing through this, and did so multiple times. I’m sold on the interpretation that the setting is an afterlife, but feel like some things are still eluding me—in an intriguing way, though, not a bad way. I collected these quotes about discrete entities vs. things as one:
“You wonder what he sees. The hearts? The swords? The wolf?”
“Too much in the posters all worlds at once like mirrors”
“They are an an they are a one a whole”
“You’d always know that all three are one and –”
“You know without knowing: the wolf.”
Last-Minute Magic
I spent a lot of time with this game and had a ton of fun, both evidenced by my detailed notes and map here. Even being the completionist that I am, though, I felt satisfied without discovering the last two items; I didn’t want to have to go through the whole map yet again. But I quite enjoyed the several hours I spent with it!
I think the way I understood it is that if you go with the botanist first, the archaeologist ends up doing the ritual with someone who is already doomed, which passes the doom onto them as well, and then to you if you do the ritual with them the second time around?
There are definitely two different winning paths, and the set of people who survive is different between the two.
Ah, that makes sense! Hmm, and I totally missed that there are two different ways to survive—interesting… May have to return and play again.
