First off: definitely the best game I’ve played where you can have fatal sex with a predatory mermaid.
So this one has been floating around near the top of my to-play list for a while and its appearance in @mathbrush 's Accelerated Reader’s Programme was the final impetus I needed. Apparently I’m susceptible to gamification …
When I first read the instructions I feared that this was going to be the kind of choice-based interface I find endlessly confusing, with inline links, buttons and checkboxes, including a warning about what seems to be a straight-up bug in the handling of options which can be checked or unchecked (presumably a shortcoming of AXMA?). Having made it to the end of the game, I never really did figure out why some things are links and some are buttons (moving up and down between the levels of the lower town uses links, but moving up and down between the levels of the upper town uses buttons?) but the general feeling of disorientation might well have been intentional for the game. (Although, after I finished and looked at the walkthrough to see what I missed, I’d never found any of the options related to getting help from the waitress at the diner, which might have been because I unchecked it accidentally due to the weird handling of checkable options.)
Actually I was a lot less lost than I feared because there’s a clearly-defined gameplay loop (explore the island, die or wake up, write new features for the island, repeat). Although I might have got too fixated on following that loop, because I think I missed several scenes as a result (as soon as I made it to morning, I basically never went back to the night time, which means I think I missed some parts of the carnival at the very least.)
Aside: I made it to morning by scrounging money to pay for a room in the motel (alone), but when I woke up it was in the aftermath of an orgy. I assumed that this was just more disconcerting weirdness, but looking at the walkthrough afterwards, it seems like there might have been more ways to end up in the motel which would have made the state you find yourself in in the morning more explicable?
I thought this was a great execution of the style of horror where everything is superficially normal on the surface but extremely far from it as soon as you start to look more deeply. There’s a general theme of cannibalism tying much of it together but it hasn’t dissuaded the author from throwing in a bunch of unrelated vignettes like the aforementioned death by mermaid.
In retrospect there seem to be a lot of options for how to progress through the game - in my case it was “just enough”, as I was never stuck for too long but by the time I made it to the end I wasn’t aware of many unexplored possibilities - so I guess a more thorough or attentive player might have had more of a sense of a broad world to explore. I can definitely imagine revisiting this game in the future to see what I might have missed the first time through.
I really liked where the ending seemed to be building to. As soon as I figured out how to reach the top level of the island I knew what I expected to find there and who I expected to be inside it, and I was right on both counts. The actual denouement was slightly less satisfying, though: it seems like the whole thing is supposed to be the protagonist’s way of processing grief, but there was no foreshadowing I came across that indicated this anywhere earlier in the story. Some of the reviews on IFDB suggested that you need to have read Dante’s Inferno to properly get the game, and I haven’t, so maybe that’s why it was lost on me, but again, nothing leading up to the ending suggested that I was missing out in that regard.
Anyway, I can certainly see why this game is highly regarded and it’s helped to expand my understanding of how a game with a choice-based interface can offer a deep world with lots of player agency in exploring it.