Know what time it is? It’s time to sit down and play all these EctoComp games!
Are you excited? Because I am excited.
ETA: Doing these in my usual style, by which I mean “off the cuff reactions as I’m playing.” I may write proper reviews of some of these later, and certainly will if someone requests it.
Food, Drink, Girls
[spoiler]Um, what?
So, um, as near as I can tell, this exactly what it says on the tin. It’s Halloween, and instead of dressing in costume, you decide to spend your evening getting drunk and leering at women. The writing is…well. I’m not sure if it’s trying to make a meta statement that I didn’t quite grasp, or if English is not the author’s native language. Throughout you run into passages like:
“You go back for another beer. You are a bit unlucky, let fall the change. Mariaanne notices, that you are a ecent man, you are go to the store for her, not for the beer.”
Typos and odd syntax abound. It’s not quite clear to me what my objectives are and what effect, if any, I have over the plot, if plot is the right word, and it’s also not quite clear if I’m supposed to sympathize with this PC or if the point is that he’s a creep, or…?
+1 for the custom CSS, though, it looks quite sharp.[/spoiler]
I can’t get Halloween Dance or Heezy Park to open, presumably because I need an interpreter I think? Somebody point me in the direction of the file I need and I’ll come back for these (and any others in a similar situation).
In the meantime, I will play…
HomeSick
[spoiler]So, first, I have to give some props to Felicity for managing to get this sheer amount of text out in 3 hours. Speed-writing is its own special skill, and this is clearly the work of someone with lots of practice and competency under her belt.
But ok, so. This story. This is like: “My Shitty Apartment: Murderous Australian Wildlife Edition” which I feel earns kudos for managing to so perfectly embody the way a whole continent has turned into an Internet meme. +1
The plot is the kind of off-the-rails silliness you’d expect from speed-IF, I think. The plotline frequently bumps along without making much sense, but not exactly in a bad way. It has the feeling of something that was written totally off-the-cuff and made up along the way, but it’s charming and ridiculous and gross. Cleaning out my fridge was on my to-do list today, but it’s suddenly become much more pressing.
Unfortunately, because it seems most of the time in the 3 hours was allotted to writing/storytelling, rather than game design, it means there’s minimal interactivity. I can’t fault it for this, but I do wish I felt I was doing more with my choices, or at least that not-meaningful choices happened more frequently.[/spoiler]