Tabitha's IFComp 2025

Competitions IFComp
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I don’t have the energy to do lots of full reviews right now (although I have done one, posted directly to IFDB), but I figured I can at least write some short reactions! Here’s the first batch, in no particular order…

Fable by Sophia Zhao

I love a low-stakes, character-focused fantasy story, especially when it’s queer. This one is a story of queer longing, and what the PC is willing to do to see (some form of) that longing fulfilled. There are layers to it, and it takes some surprising turns. After finishing I backed up a bit to see some of the other possible endings (I’ve found three so far, but there may be more).

Clickbait by Reilly Olson

I had a really fun time with this one. There were some parser struggles, but I always figured out the right command in the end (I suggest reading the “help” text upfront, as it has a list of verbs and command phrasing), and I quite enjoyed the strong narrative voice. The camera was a fun device with both a narrative and a puzzle-solving purpose, and there are fun extra touches, like that you can wear some of the trash you find and take goofy selfies with it. And catering specifically to me, there’s even a character who’s obsessed with rats!

Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade by Lamp Post Projects

This was fun as both a mystery game and as a historically-inspired opera-focused work! The author has clearly done their research, and I loved being immersed in the details of instruments, musical keys, and opera politics; there’s enough to provide good flavor, but not so much as to be overwhelming. I was able to figure out most of the mystery, and the in-game hint system pointed me toward the piece I was missing. There are also bonus achievements, and I enjoyed replaying to earn some more of them and explore different options.

Slated for Demolition by Meri Something

This one gave me a lot of feelings, and whenever that’s the case with a work I always have trouble putting said feelings into words. I’ll just have to settle for, it’s a really strong work about trauma and how it ripples out and affects your whole life.

HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT by Larissa Janus

Confession: I haven’t really played the Dick McButts or Rod McSchlong games; I tried both out but lost interest pretty quickly. :sweat_smile: But this entry promised something different, and it certainly delivered! (I got the game-y version with the cards.) It’s both funny and full of biting commentary on the UK government and being trans in 2025.

The Witch Girls by Amy Stevens

This one uses genre horror to capture some of the real-life horror of being a teenage girl. Social pressures, identity struggles, friendship with people who are actually shitty friends, desire mixed with fear and uncertainty—it’s all explored through some attempted witchcraft and the variety of results those attempts can get you.

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High on Grief by Bez

This one resonated a lot with me. I was glad to get to follow all the threads of Yancy’s thoughts/feelings/reactions about/to their mother’s death; there are a lot, and some of them are contradictory, because this is a situation where of course their feelings are complex and messy, and the game did a great job exploring that. While initially I thought some of the convos with the friends felt too neat, too pat, the game itself called this out, with Yancy’s sort-of diary entries reflecting that while they may have told their friends they agreed with their advice/found it helpful, really they just said what their friends wanted to hear while knowing things aren’t actually that simple or easy.

There’s also a meta element where Yancy talks to us, the players, about the fact that they are the main character in a game. They wonder whether they’re really a person, and essentially ask us to treat them like one, because there is a real person behind their existence, who created them and has given them some of their (the creator’s) own trauma and complex emotions. This made me think about the vulnerability of sharing a work like this, and how it’s reviewers’ responsibility to take care with how we approach writing about it, because when we judge the characters or emotions on display, we could very well be judging a real person.

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Imperial Throne by Alex Crossley

Unmarked spoilers ahead

Expanding on some of what I said in this thread, I had fun playing this one, but ultimately, looking at the walkthrough (after playing through several times without it) kind of ruined it for me. Initially, I really enjoyed exploring the possibility space, both as far as testing out commands and, on replaying, being more strategic and seeing if any of my strategizing would pay off. After five playthroughs (some of which, admittedly, were not actual attempts to do well), I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was and wasn’t possible. But when I cracked open the walkthrough out of curiosity, I saw multiple possible actions that I’d never thought of.

The walkthrough starts out with a list of useful commands, which I think should have been included in the game itself; players could have a choice of whether to view them or not, but I think the player should definitely be made aware of their existence. Especially because I learned from the walkthrough that some of my attempted actions that had been rejected by the game were actually possible, I just hadn’t been using the right phrasing. Implementing more synonyms and/or including helpful failure messages that point the player toward the correct wording would help with that issue, too.

But what’s a bigger deal to me is that, pre-walkthrough, I’d concluded that ending the game with some level of failure was inevitable—whether the empire being completely overtaken, or its borders shrinking. And I liked that; the game seemed to be saying “No matter what you do, empires are doomed to fall.” But the walkthrough presents a series of commands that leads to an ending where you’ve not only held onto your current territory, you’ve expanded and conquered others’.

Given that this is the only path presented in the walkthrough, clearly the author considers it the ideal ending. With Drew Cook’s essay on “The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode” fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help feeling that my whole experience of the game had been deflated by this authorial intervention. My own interpretation went out the window, replaced by “Oh, it’s just a game where you win by growing your empire.” The game’s fantasy world is very generic/traditional, with barbaric tribes harassing your borders and women appearing only as courtesans or brides. Before, when left to interpret the game myself, I could see these as purposeful choices; now, though, they just seem lazy.

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The Tempest of Baraqiel by Nathan Leigh

I really liked this one… up until the ending. I enjoyed inhabiting the main character and exploring the unique situation they (she?)[1] found themself in, pulled from academia into the military to work on a top-secret translation assignment, with the shadow of their deceased war-hero mother constantly looming over them, influencing everyone’s perceptions and expectations. But ultimately, the payoff was disappointing. In my first playthrough, after making basically zero translation progress, the outcome of the climactic moment came down to a random guess—which I got wrong, to disastrous consequences.

Fortunately I had enabled the “back” button and could easily try different choices until I got a “good” ending, but even this one felt very abrupt and perfunctory and was unsatisfying. Both endings referenced a character who I hadn’t heard of before, leaving me feeling like I had missed something important. But with the “save” function broken, replaying over and over until I discovered the key path(s) felt like more trouble than it was worth (until today, when I opened the JS file and poked around a bit to get some guidance. But obviously, having to resort to that is not ideal!). This feels like a game where you need to see multiple paths to get the full picture, but it fights against itself by not making it easy to do so.

  1. Initially I assumed the MC was a man because I’ve used the name “Kel” for a male character in my work, but then I realized I never saw a gender specified during any of my playthroughs, but then on replaying more today I saw a scene where I think someone starts to call them “ma’am”. But I’ll stick with “they” since it isn’t clearly specified. ↩︎

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Oh, wow, I got the same ending as you in ‘Baraqiel’ and also felt like it was a ‘multiple paths are necessary to understand stuff’ game. It’s really interesting to me that we both got that same impression. Thanks for the review!

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A few more mini reviews!

The Little Four by Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E.

A confession: I’ve only ever read one Agatha Christie novel, and it’s the Poirot-less And Then There Were None, so I went into this game with absolutely zero knowledge of the characters or their circumstances. But fortunately, that didn’t matter. There was enough context provided that I could easily pick up the backstory, and I was charmed right away by both the writing and the setup—a bachelor and a widower sharing a flat and co-raising the latter’s children together. The homoerotic potential of this arrangement is high, and the game doesn’t disappoint there; I loved the results of repeatedly examining Poirot and the response to telling the PC to kiss him.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the biggest hiccup I encountered was the mystery bit; I spent a fair bit of time re-examining everything I’d already looked at, which was kind of tedious, and when it came time to make an accusation, the game’s multiple layers of “Are you sure?” made me chicken out the first time—but at that point the game wouldn’t let me reload a save, so I had to quit and restart. Hence two separate transcript files! But overall, this was a very enjoyable experience.

Transcripts (I played the version updated on September 10):
transcript1.txt (162.2 KB)
transcript2.txt (21.3 KB)

Saltwrack by Antemaion (spoilers!)

One of my favorites of the comp this year. The atmosphere of threat, of something not quite right, escalating into something very much not right, but also bringing with it new possibilities… The danger but also beauty of the frozen landscape, the mysterious companions who you can decide to trust or not. Excellent, moody writing. Very Southern Reach trilogy-esque without feeling derivative. I absolutely adored the first ending I got—settling in to live in an underground garden with the second oracle, embracing my new connection with the not-so-hostile-after-all land. I played again to see how things went with a different set of companions, and enjoyed my second time through almost as much; will very likely be returning again to see more of the variations. And definitely going to check out the author’s other work!

Will end with one of my favorite quotes:

It’s just you and the land. The land, you know now, is so terribly alive. It recognizes you, seeks you. It wants to touch you in any way it can. Some think that the salt wrack is uncaring, indifferent. You know better. It would change you; it would incorporate you into itself. If you let it.

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Thank you for taking the time to review The Little Four!

I want to sincerely apologize for the confusion and tedium—I had a difficult time fine-tuning everything in the rush to meet the competition deadline, and the Inform extension I used for the final question gave me a lot of trouble. But I’m relieved to hear that your time with the game was still pleasant overall! I hope to deliver a smoother and more satisfying experience in the expanded post-comp release.

Your transcripts were very helpful (and fun) to read through, and are greatly appreciated. I have a new update in the works for all the recently-reported issues that can be fixed mid-comp; for everything else, I’m aiming to at least keep the help guide updated so that players have somewhere to turn to.

Thanks again and have a lovely autumn!

P.S.:

I’ve taken the liberty of sending you a private message with a couple of comments and questions about your playthrough, in case that’s something you would be open to.

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Thank you for this wonderfully kind review, Tabitha! (And for the link!)

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Backpackward by Zach Dodson for Interactive Tragedy, Limited

Two things I want to say about this game:

One: It’s buggy. The variable tracking is borked; the game was constantly referencing choices I hadn’t made and items I didn’t have with me.

Two: It’s gross toward its female characters, including playing the idea of sexual assault for laughs. Excerpts if you want to see for yourself:

Excerpts

BERT
Who has the gold?

SEWARD
The King. It is well-guarded, in the castle.

CICILIA
As is my sister.

BERT
Your…

CICILIA
I guess she was the beautiful one.

BERT
So, your wife’s… sister?

SEWARD
Every maiden, when she comes of age, must present herself at the castle. Some never return.

BERT
That sounds… Every woman, huh? So your wife’s sister…

When she sees you, she slips the shoulder of her dress down. OK, that’s definitely a seductive look.

CICILIA
You have freed my sister?

BERT
The castle defenses… Is she being violated, there?

CICILIA
Of course. It’s ALWAYS violation, Rambo. With every man.

CICILIA
You seek audience with the king… to argue for my sister’s safe return.

She winks. Is she flirting or suggesting that…

CICILIA
She’s the most beautiful girl in the village, you know. And unmarried. Unsullied. We think. A Wizard for a husband! What girl should be so lucky?

BERT
Are you trying to seduce me on behalf of your…

CICILIA
Legs like this!

CICILIA lifts her skirts. You turn your gaze, instinctively. When you turn back to peek, she catches you, and is suddenly mad.

GOTH GRRRL
Smoke break before we start?

BERT
You know, in actual Gothic times, when young women came of age, if there was a King, they had to…

It’s 2025, and I have zero patience for this shit. But apparently multiple other IFComp games (that I won’t be playing) contain pretty egregious misogyny—and this was an issue last year, too. I can only hold out hope that the 2026 IFComp will be better.

Edit: Have now expanded this a bit for IFDB.

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Retrograding by Happy Cat Games

This one only has one review so far, and I played it yesterday, so I feel compelled to write something about it… but I’m not sure that I have anything particularly insightful or interesting to say. :sweat_smile: It’s a visual novel that drops you straight into the life of the PC with little to help orient you; in short order you meet a virtual boss and a character that seems to be an AI that lives in the PC’s head, and learn that the PC is happy with her low-level waste management job and has no interest in climbing the ranks (which, it’s later revealed, does seem like it comes with more risks than rewards).

What is “waste management” in this sci-fi world? It seems to be collecting detritus from various planets, cataloging it, and then destroying it. But it was never clear to me why this is being done. Why is this corporation “managing waste” on a bunch of long-abandoned planets? In a way the finds are treated as archaeological objects, with the cataloguing component of the process, but the motivation behind documenting rather than just destroying is never elaborated. Also, when the gameplay shifts to you going on these search-and-collect missions, you’re only allowed to take one object from each, which seems entirely counter to the idea of waste management, and is likewise never explained.

The heart of the story, though, is the PC’s relationships—with Maria, the AI she (from what I gathered) designed and had implanted in her own brain, and with the two mission companions you get to choose between. I replayed to experience both paths, one with the company golden child turned defector turned reeducated drone (or so the PC initially believes) Zinnia, and the other with the volatile former racer, now condemned criminal Raven. In my playthroughs, at least, the PC develops an attachment to whichever one you choose, which happens largely without player input; the main player choices are of which piece of junk you salvage on each trip, and from peeking at the walkthrough, these are what determine which ending you’ll get.

On the Raven path, my choices led to me forming an attachment to him, ripping the AI mechanism out of my head, and preparing for the two of us to flee together… only for me to ultimately betray him to the company, turning him in and ending the story with my AI back in place. I’m not sure what it was about my choices of objects that led to this dramatic series of events. The Zinnia path, in contrast, was much more subdued—the PC’s opinion of her slowly changed, and the two ended by professing love for each other. This path also had more tension with Maria; her presence seemed like more of a burden to the PC in this route, with regular interludes emphasizing that.

While the sprites are original art, the backgrounds are photographs of real places (mostly buildings), some with real people in them, which made them a hard sell for portraying abandoned sci-fi planets. Maybe this was on purpose, the game using its sci-fi trappings to comment on real life, but if that is the case, the parallels it’s drawing definitely went over my head.

So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but my main feeling coming away was one of confusion. The company the PC works for seems to be powerful and evil, but I was never sure what they were actually doing aside from sending employees on these waste management missions. What do higher-ranking employees do? What does it mean to be a “defector” in this world?

I’m not sure if this is the kind of VN where getting all the endings will unlock a “true” ending that sheds new light on everything that’s gone before; I only played each path once, but the walkthrough reveals they both have a variety of possible endings. Having spent an hour and a half with the game already, though, I wasn’t particularly motivated to replay several more times in order to collect all the endings. I may dip back in at least once, though, to at least see just how different the outcomes of each path can be.

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The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens by Lamp Post Projects

I’ve now played all three IFComp games by Lamp Post Projects (LPP; this review is going to get fairly acronym-heavy!), and have, inevitably, been comparing them. My favorite is Fantasy Opera (FO); one reason for that is its specific details, making it very grounded in its 17th-century-Italy-inspired opera house setting. The other two LPP games, while drawing on specific historical inspirations (which are detailed in the “behind the game” documents that each links to at the end), had much more generic-feeling fantasy settings. Another thing I preferred in FO is that the PC was a bit less of a blank slate; they have a defined profession (detective), and depending on the stats you pick, they may have knowledge of different areas of the world/society.

In The Path of Totality (PT), the other LPP IFComp game which this review is not actually about, you get to pick at the beginning what it is that’s drawn you to go on the central pilgrimage, which allowed me to characterize the PC a bit. In The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens (SSG), though, you are pretty much the blankest of blank slates. In both SGG and PT, a big part of the focus is on forming relationships with the NPCs—but in both, the way to form those relationships is basically just to always pick the nice/pleasant dialogue option, as opposed to the more neutral or cold/rude ones. As such, the relationship building in SSG didn’t feel authentic to me; I wasn’t developing relationships with these people, but just avoiding being a jerk, and that alone was enough for them to become attached to me. I would have liked opportunities to actively characterize the PC more. For example, what if there were multiple nice/supportive options, but in different tones, like earnest/sincere, commiserating, and lighthearted?

I liked the setup of SSG, with the PC’s mysterious draw to the titular gardens, getting pulled into an old mystery and the current woes of the staff. But again, I preferred FO’s investigation mechanics—rolling dice for knowledge or dexterity checks, interviewing people; in SSG it often just felt like “make sure you click every option.” And the puzzles felt too easy: the naiad’s name was so strongly signposted it didn’t really feel like a puzzle; the tooth one was easily solved by lawnmowering (although I did like the line-drawing one; it was satisfying to get it right on my first guess!). I also missed the sense of time pressure from FO; the pacing of SSG felt almost too leisurely, where there was a sense of (or sometimes it was literal) just waiting around until circumstances were right for the next story beat. The journal segments also slowed the pacing; I’d prefer if they were available to view anytime from the menu, so I could refresh my memory on prior events (as I played over several days), instead of being inserted into the story.

Going back to the actual plot: you discover that three staff members at Sylvan Gardens have magical ailments (one of which is an “everyone you love will suffer a terrible fate” curse) and that the long-deceased founder of the estate, Pecunia, hid her store of magical plant seeds behind various puzzley gating mechanisms. The fourth NPC, ostensibly the gardens’ hermit, later reveals himself as a centuries-old dryad who’s the only surviving member of his species as far as he knows, after Pecunia destroyed his forest to build her home, inadvertently wiping out all the other resident dryads. So there’s a lot of pain and trauma in these characters’ backstories, more than I had expected given the gentle tone and vibes of the game, and the way these past tragedies were incorporated didn’t quite work for me. For example, Felix the gardener discovered his curse when his wife died tragically, but I don’t recall ever getting to ask him about her; she’s just a sad fact to add pathos to his plight. I wanted the game to sit with the tragedies imposed on its characters a bit more, rather than just using them as motivation for the player/PC.

I also felt the game veered into the “magical disability cure” trope with Rion in particular, who faces magically-induced memory loss and brain fog. These are real things that some people have to live with, and here making it magic-gone-wrong that can be erased with the right plant felt a little trivializing. And then there’s Pecunia; there are real-world analogues to her estate, e.g. historic sites that were once the homes of white enslavers, but it seems that neither in the past nor the present was she ever taken to task for what she did. When the other staff members find out about this previously-hidden dark history, they basically go “oh that’s terrible” and then everything continues as it was; there’s no talk of closing or reinterpreting the site.

…Until, that is, the ending. The last of the secret seeds that you discover are dryad seeds; planting them will grow new dryads, bringing back this thought-to-be-lost population. But, for magical reasons, doing so will threaten the gardens and the nearby village, where the PC and NPCs all live. Here, the player gets to choose what to do: leave the dryads to non-existence; plant the seeds despite the risk; or go with one of the in-between options. No matter what, you’ll disappoint at least one of the NPCs, who all have their own opinions on the best course of action—and I really liked how this subverted the previous “there’s one obvious best choice” structure, even if I was very anti-Pecunia by this point and thus didn’t find choosing to plant the seeds very hard.

This is a fairly critical review, but I think LPP is a skilled author who’s clearly put a lot of work into all three of these games and is doing cool things with Ink (replacing the continuous-scroll text pane with a single page + history view; adding a nice menu system with multiple save slots; incorporating lovely watercolor art and original music). I did enjoy my time with SSG, and I look forward to seeing what LPP does in the future!

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Violent Delight by Coral Nulla

Disclaimer: I tested this game. During that process I played it at least three times, and the repeat plays definitely aided my understanding and analysis.

Violent Delight begins with you ordering an old video game cartridge… and then waiting. For one hour, in real-time. This mechanic has been talked about a lot; mostly, people seem to be frustrated by it. But I think it’s definitely got a purpose in the game. For one thing, the player and PC are aligned in the wait, and it’s for lack of anything better to do that you’ll try to check out the “Iffy Camp” games on your simulated computer… only to receive the message, “Sorry, art can no longer be experienced in your country as a measure to protect the children.” We’ll come back to this. Besides that, I saw it as a commentary on our instant gratification culture. Imagine ordering something from eBay and having it arrive within one hour. We already have next-day shipping (and I think same-day shipping is a thing with some companies?), but this is next-level: the PC can purchase something and have a mere hour wait… and yet players are still going to be impatient, wanting it to come even faster. This is underscored by the option to “demand efficiency” from the already very efficient shipping company.

After the one-hour wait, the cartridge arrives and the meat of the game starts. Other reviews have described this part, so I won’t repeat it, but as we go down the layers of “The Playground”, we see the child characters from the first level get older, and as they do things basically get worse and worse for them. There’s a hell, but that’s an early level; just wait till you get to the office. At the end, the boundaries of the world of The Playground and the PC’s real life blur and merge. Because everything that’s happening in the game is just… life. School is cruel, hospitals are cruel, workplaces are cruel… the world is a shitty place, systems are evil, and we’re stuck inside them, getting beaten down and ground up.

Remember those geoblocked IFComp Iffy Camp games? They’re blocked to protect the children, because god forbid children be exposed to violence… Except real life is violence, and that irony of hand-wringing fears about “the children” while the same governments let said children grow up in poverty and be dehumanized by capitalism and stripped of the things that give them joy is captured so perfectly by Violent Delight.

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Thanks so much for playing (all three!) games, and for sharing your review!

I just want to add that I had included content warnings* for the sensitive topics you mentioned, for the reasons that you mentioned: “Sylvan Gardens” definitely touches on some difficult real-world themes (especially in its critique of colonialism) through metaphor and fantasy allegory. This was intentional, and I genuinely tried my best to accomplish it with care. I’ll consider providing more context about this in a possible postmortem.

Thanks again for engaging with my work!

* “Content warning: Depictions of memory loss. Characters grieving loss of family/spouse. References to genocide against fantasy species.”

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Hi Nell! I just wanted to note that I did see the CWs before playing, but I think the phrasing of this one in particular (“references to”) led me to believe it would be more of a minor thing, rather than a central aspect of the plot. So the combination of that expectation plus the work’s generally cozy tone meant I was pretty surprised by the reveal.

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Cart by Brett Witty

Spoilers within

Cart is a dark story. When the PC died on my first playthrough, I replayed to see if I could avoid that… and no, you can’t; you’ll always meet the same, unpleasant fate. But what comes after that can vary. Not significantly—in fact, after two playthroughs, I came away thinking it was a work with a very bleak outlook. During the game, one of the main things you can choose is how you treat an orphaned boy—being kind to him, or pushing him away. After your death there’s an epilogue, a brief moment showing the boy grown up. If you were kind to him, this epilogue contains a description of him as “ever hungry, forever empty.” If you were mean to him, he’s described as “a husk of a man.”

Initially, I read these two descriptions as being essentially the same, and my takeaway was that the boy was so scarred by his past trauma that how I treated him didn’t really matter in the long run. BUT, that view completely ignores the other differences between the two versions of the epilogue, and what I was missing clicked for me when I read Mike’s review. In the version of the epilogue after you’ve been kind to the boy, he’s now “a man tempered in steel and fire” who helped take down the fascist tyrant who had you killed, and he ends the scene by “surging ever forward”. In the other ending, in contrast, he’s following in the PC’s sad footsteps, pushing along a cart of waste while looking on the tyrant’s dead body with “indifferent eyes”. In the first version, he’s played a decisive role in the tyrant’s deposition; in the other, he’s taken the path of least resistance. Maybe he is “forever empty” either way, but in one case, that emptiness drives him to action, while in the other it leaves him simply trudging through life.

Again, what makes the difference is how the PC treats him during the time that their lives overlap. And… I’ve got nothing more eloquent to say about that than what Mike’s already said at the end of his review, so, go read that!

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Crescent Sea Story by Stewart C. Baker

The opening of this one had me intrigued, with the PC waking up with amnesia on a boat surrounded by five shadow-selves. You have to travel to five islands to get back your memories, which for the player means gaining more and more of an understanding of this world and what led the protagonist to be in this situation. Sadly, I can’t say I fully enjoyed this process—the PC is a pretty unpleasant person, and unluckily for me, the first island I picked had gameplay that fell afoul of Brian’s “a perfect simulation of a boring or annoying situation is boring or annoying” wisdom. Made to complete a series of repetitive tasks, the PC becomes angry at the NPC giving the orders; meanwhile, I became frustrated at the game for simulating tedium too well.

I’m not sure if I was meant to empathize with the PC once I got the full story. Basically, the presence of gods and spirits in the human world started giving people a nasty illness that makes them deteriorate and fall apart… and the PC decided that the best way to do that was to defeat and drive them out forever. I had a lot of questions, though, like—did anyone try talking to the spirits about this? Did anyone investigate to learn why this was happening and if anything less drastic could be done about it? Because of my lack of conviction that the PC’s course of action was the right one, I didn’t feel aligned with his goals during the climactic ending section, and certainly wasn’t happy when he inevitably triumphed.

It is very possible that I missed or overlooked some crucial piece of the story; after encountering that tedious section, I was somewhat disengaged from the rest of the game. I’m interested in reading more reviews to see what others make of this one.

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PURE by PLAYPURPUR

I played this one a few weeks ago now, and I’m not going to talk about the puzzles or gameplay or implementation at all, because I know other people will cover them and they aren’t what stuck with me. What I remember about this game is the sense of inevitability; you will progress, you will go onward (you don’t navigate with directional commands, just “forward”), deeper into this cave system, closer to your fate.

What is the fate that awaits you at the end, and why are you being compelled toward it? These are questions that arise early on, as I wondered why the PC, accompanied by two guards as well as someone called “the heir” who seems to be their lover, was being brought to this place with no say in the matter. There’s clearly a purpose to it, one the heir fully believes in; we don’t know what the PC thinks.

The guards start out derisive, disgusted by the PC (again for reasons unknown), but as you progress, a transformation begins. You start falling apart, skin peeling away, fluids oozing out—and your companions transform too, in their attitude toward you, the guards becoming fawning and worshipful, wanting to taste your leavings, while the heir grows near-ecstatic. We’re leading up to something, to a conclusion, a revelation… except not, because the game ends before bringing any of this together; it’s another “Part 1” situation, weirdly common in this comp, but this one didn’t warn about that in the front matter, so I had no idea that it wasn’t a complete work in itself (okay, looking back at the comp page just now, there is a “Part 1: The Descent” subtitle, but in my defense the placement and formatting of the subtitles on that page has led my eyes to skip over them, so I hadn’t noticed it before). So while there’s certainly an interesting setup here, sadly it doesn’t go anywhere in this piece.

Transcript: Pure_script.txt (66.8 KB)

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:joy:

I tried to mitigate this best I could, but I knew it was a risk…

The PC isn’t intended to be sympathetic, fwiw (in fact he is the main antagonist in my latest choicescript game, Spire, Surge, and Sea!). When I first brainstormed this game, I was interested in exploring radicalisation and how it almost always leads to some kind of violence. I lost sight of that a little as I kept working on the game and some things kind of shifted around due to time constraints or my tendency to get distracted, so probably it’s a bit of a muddle in the resulting game.

I also struggle to connect with characters that are not nice people, so I can def. understand the game not working for you! (FWIW, it sounds like you got the “rage” ending. Neither of the other two endings are particularly triumphant, and I think they show the consequences faced by the PC a lot more strongly.)

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Oh, that’s good to know—I’ll go back and check out the other endings!

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A few more mini reviews…

The Olive Tree by Francesco Giovannangelo

I can certainly see what the intent of this work is, but for me it wasn’t that successful. It wants to humanize the suffering that’s happening in Palestine, but it speeds through multiple generations so quickly and perfunctorily that I never felt like any of the characters were real people. It’s just a sketch of a family, with 100% predictable story beats—a house and land passing down from one generation to the next, young love, an aging parent, a tragic death. The game wanted to elicit emotion from me, but it didn’t do enough to earn that. If it had slowed down and developed its characters as individuals, and really explored the circumstances they find themselves in instead of skipping from one major development to the next, I think it could have been a lot more effective.

INPUT PROCESS by HY

I played this one a bit ago, drawn in by the blurb’s promise that it was about a sapphic relationship. And on that front it didn’t disappoint! It’s basically toxic yuri with a human/AI pairing (like, an actual AI, as in a sentient being, not the real-life LLM version). The relationship is compellingly messy, painfully so at times, and I was invested and wanted to know where it would go (the answer: different places depending on your choices!). The protagonist has done some fucked up things, and is forced to reckon with the consequences. But I have to admit that the timed text hurt my experience; not being able to read at my natural pace left me less engaged than I would have been otherwise.

Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story by Phil Riley

This is one that I tested. I enjoyed the progression of it, how you slowly translate pieces of the alien language, which lets you understand more and more of the text you encounter until finally you can read (almost) all of it. I so appreciated the option to skip some of the puzzles, as they were a type that doesn’t really appeal to me, and I enjoyed realizing the solution to the sole unskippable one. The best moment in the game is one that takes advantage of the uniqueness of parser IF—the player, armed with their knowledge of the circumstances/world/characters, gets to think up the perfect command for the situation and feel very clever.

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