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Some of the endings are easy (the ones where you reach breaking point) but a few require some very sub-optimal choices :D

Let me preface this review by noting that I am parser noob — or worse, parser-challenged. Solving parser games is not my forte, though I have managed to stumble through a fair number this contest.

That said, my review is:

This would accomplish nothing.
The story doesn’t understand that command.
You cannot attack that.
The word “X” is not necessary in this story.
You cannot attach those to anything.
You see no reason to do that whatsoever.

The only valid command I managed to enter (without hints from someone else) made me lose the game immediately :D

On the one hand, I loved the introduction, the concept, the writing, the creepy/icky insectness of it all.

On the other hand, I suffered the usual parser friction of guess-the-word, without any really clever solutions that made it feel worth the effort of having to do so. The game has pleasant hinting, but that just underlines the fact that there’s a lot of guesswork in pulling the right verb from the sumptuous text. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better just as kinetic fiction?

Very much noted about the music. I’m not a musician, and I tend to turn the music off when I play games, but I know how much people appreciate it, so my next game I will try!

(I did do one game with music, but no one ever commented on it, so I don’t know if that’s a bad sign).

I had gone behind the TV and removed the panel, but the game kept telling me it was my chance to go behind the TV and remove the panel. Also I got told the panel was there after it was removed, and ended up going back and forth behind the TV for a while until I got out.

I am not sure why this is a parser game, per say. Maybe there are deep and meaningful parodies of existing parser games that I am not well-played enough to understand?

I’m going to assume that’s it :D

I very much enjoyed the mechanic, and also the feel and sound effects. It felt surprisingly short, even after a couple of playthroughs, but I don’t know if I just missed a lot of options.

I enjoyed this a lot, even as a parser (or parser-like) newb. I did struggle with a couple of the puzzles, and I also got stuck in a loop at the end, where the game kept telling me to do something I’d already done, but I enjoyed it, and loved the quirky worldbuilding.

I definitely liked this the most of the student games. Like the rest it could really have used a spell check (more than the others, maybe), but anyone using the Twine app doesn’t actually have one at their disposal, so that’s forgiveable. I liked the dreamlike atmosphere and the multiple good and bad endings.

I got lost. Then I got the boring ending. It might have been nice to tell the player what their goal was at the start.

I suspect this game is doing lots of very clever parser things that I am too much of a parser noob to understand :D

I’m glad you are enjoying the game!

There’s an element of gating going on. Like the game doesn’t want you to go upstairs before you’ve been to the office, you can’t go to the courtyard before going upstairs, and so on. The items you are looking for tend to be in another area (with one obvious exception), so if you can’t find something, check another area, and if you can’t find it there look to see if you’ve unlocked the next area.

I am invested in the world you are revealing here. Who’s in the right, who’s in the wrong (is anyone either)? I’ve swung back and forth between rooting for both sides.

It is :) Attempt at spoilers below:

I don’t have it open any more. But after speaking to another player, I don’t think I actually missed anything. It was more that I was expecting something that I then didn’t see, which is again, on me :D

I not really a parser player, so I don’t know if I had a transcript from either of the times I played, sorry!

I did indeed mean “after a wait”, sorry about that

Charming rather than horrifying, but still very enjoyable for all that. I wouldn’t have minded another couple of encounters, but given the short timescale this is still pretty impressive.

Wikipedia suggests the idea that the cap has feathers is a mis-reading. I have no idea :D

I have a distinct feeling that I am missing the twist …

I liked the way that each poem’s end began the next, but I loathed the colour, so much that I was distracted at the start of each poem turning it off in the stylesheet :D

I’m not a fan of timed text at any time, even in the service of kinetic poetry, but I confess I was really confused by the places where clicking a link displayed a whole stanza, but only after a link. The first time, I thought the game had stopped working.

I really liked the way that your room grows more and more dystopian (or at least more and more diverged from reality) as the game goes on. Whether that’s just the consequence of lack of sleep, or of the internet, or of an actual change in circumstance, I wasn’t sure.

I have to admit that I haven’t managed a proper play-through. I read quickly, and try to fit playing games in lulls at work, and so I was expecting (from the other comments) the delayed text to be infuriating, but it was much worse than I expected, and I just had to give up.

I suspect there’s a brilliant game here. The writing is snappy, the art is evocative, and the minigames are very well realised (though I note that on the first one I spent ages memorising the letter combinations, only to actually need the grid coordinates, which I couldn’t then remember).

I look forward to playing the post-contest version.

Thank you very much!

Yay!

I watched this show.

I feel like I’m always watching this show. It’s not my favourite, but it’s on anyway. Sometimes it’s about houses, sometimes it’s not.

Side note: the game just stops right … or did it break on me? I’m not sure if I’d know.

I enjoyed this greatly. It’s gorgeous, which never hurts, with a very muted yet vivid colour palette, and the yellow brick road makes a great mechanism for indicating exits (though a few of them didn’t quite line up as well they could have). I really felt for the poor Munchkins, pity I couldn’t do more for them!

Thanks so much for the comment!

The gum was a last minute addition, so it’s maybe not as well signposted as it should be. Maybe post-contest I’ll see if I can find a better way to point it out to players.

The game is so much harder than I ever intended, but I’m glad it’s worth pushing through

I’ve had some trouble deciding what exactly to write in this comment, because I struggled with the game itself. It made me deeply uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure that it was meant to do so in the way that I did.

A lot of the comments describe the game as romantic, but I was overwhelmed by how well you presented Andrew as a realistic abuser. He made my skin crawl from the first meeting, and all I wanted to do was get away from him. Yet he was also presented as in some ways attractive, especially in the shed sequence.

After looking at the various endings I’ve come to the conclusion that he is meant to be the monster I took him to be from the very start, and for the same reasons — he’s a narcissistic abuser, and a sexual predator.

Why do I feel that the “unnecessarily early ending” is the good one? :)

I appreciated the touches of grim humour in this one.

Why do I feel that the “unnecessarily early ending” is the good one? :)

I appreciated the touches of grim humour in this one.

One note, you should maybe make the background of this page fixed, so that the comments are easy to read :D

Annihilation, but with salt.

That’s not a throwaway review, I really felt the vibes of Annihilation (or perhaps of the Southern Reach as a whole, rather than just the first book). The sense of an intrusion into the world, the transformation of what is familiar into what is rich and strange and malevolent. People can approach the heart of the mystery, but they return changed and altered.

I suppose in that parallel Saltwrack would be set far later in the process of transformation than Annihilation, not when the infection begins, but once the alteration is already complete … or is it.

In case it’s not clear, I loved this.

I want to like this game, but it’s sadly clear that there’s a fundamental disconnect between how my brain works and how yours does. I spent 20 fruitless minutes on the first puzzle, and even after getting the solution from the walkthrough, I couldn’t see how I was supposed to work out the answer.

I do like the wit and art on display though!

While I liked the story in concept, I felt that there weren’t really enough clues to make this a happy experience. The mentioned flowers can be any of many colours. “Extra heat” could many of a bunch of pieces of clothing.

I got the ghost in the end, but just by a principle of exhaustive alternatives over and over till one was right. I didn’t really feel that I was solving the puzzle, rather just brute-forcing it.

It is indeed a Wasteland reference, and so indirectly also a Tempest reference. :)

I’m making a list of all the errors!

Next time I’ll employ you as a tester :D

Thank you so much for all the testing work!

As a non-USA-ian, it’s nice to get the Halloween experience, even if second hand :) Some of the customs have spread over here, but it’s not the same — we still carve turnips some of the time, and celebrate Samhain up the hill.

Answering US-candy quizzes is also hard :D

Our summers are brief and seldom hot enough, so my dread is less.

Shades of Annihilation but beneath the sea.

Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!

I’m not experienced enough with ChoiceScript to know if the use of achievements and scores is normal or not. It looked like there were quite a few available for dying at various spots, but they might just be for bad choices? It was an interesting choice in any case.

I appreciated the second chance at the final section, I suspect that getting to that point without needing the extra health requires a very perfect set of choices.