I’m really enjoying your reviews, Billy!
(And also, off-subject slightly: eximeno, are you the Santiago Eximeno with games on boardgamegeek? Welcome! I will have to print those out and give them a try!)
I am glad you are enjoying my reviews! I am enjoying the games! So thank you if you made one or are getting inspired to make one from this competition, or are even playing them yourself.
Also, I do not consider anything to be off topic in a topic that I start up myself because I enjoy the company.
@Billy Mays:
First of all, thank you very much for your review of “Light into Darkness”!
However, I do need to clarify one thing (and this is absolutely not your fault, I didn’t notice the ambiguous grammar until I read your review):
The “she” in the portion you quoted (the leather-bound book in the ending scene) refers to the daughter, not the mother. If you go into Marjo’s room, you find notes with occult diagrams, and if you speak to Marjo during the confrontation, she herself will imply that she is behind the supernatural phenomena. In short: Marjo is the villain, the protagonist did the right thing in putting her down (unless, of course, you take the tack that she’s suffered a psychosis and Marjo was innocent).
So yeah, I totally missed that there was ambiguity in that sentence, which is kind of damning, given that it’s at such a weighty point in the story. But then again, I wrote it in three hours…
@Christina Nordlander
Thank you for clearing that up! I always appreciate the opportunity to discuss games that I have enjoyed with their authors!
“Light into Darkness” Ectocomp2016 spoiler heavy
[spoiler]Thank you for writing the game, it was very beautifully written which was one of the reasons that deducting the point was so difficult for me.
The story was very gripping, so I was paying a lot of attention to it, but maybe the blame is on me for missing something?
Here is how I perceived the timeline of the game:
-
I stepped from my hallway into a grass field and and saw the protagonist murdering her daughter with the broken bottle in the garden house.
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I returned back to the house and found the demonic notes in the daughter’s room.
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I killed the demonic daughter with the glass bottle, which my mind connected with the scene from a moment earlier.
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Read the book and the newspaper and went to through the burning light.
So this lead me to conclude that my eternal punishment for murdering my daughter was that I would first have to witness my sin, then I would be taunted by demons taking my daughter’s form until I was forced to kill them in an act that mocked the original tragedy, with the original murder weapon, then I would walk into the light, get vaporized, and repeat it for all of eternity.
This would have worked magnificently if it wasn’t for the books and the newspaper that muddied up the story a good bit. The book and newspaper was the core of of my criticism in my original review.
I think this game could be significantly improved by eliminating the book and the newspaper entirely, keep everything else as it was, and at the end: you walk into the light like you had it in the game, add several sharply written sentences to describe the character getting immolated, and the character’s screams getting gradually quieter until the story loops back around and her dimming screams are the noise that startled her out of bed in the first place. This would be her loop of torment.[/spoiler]
And I should thank you for giving such an in-depth and positive comment. I agree that the last scene is kind of hit-or-miss.
I will definitely bear your points in mind. At the end of the day, though, I’m happy with the direction I took the story, even though it obviously could do with a ton more polish.
I can respect that. I was just offering you one man’s opinion, and we all know what opinions are like. [emote];)[/emote]
Yes, I design boardgames too [emote]:)[/emote] You can print my games or give them a try on Android/iOS (search for “Land 6” or “Constructo”).
You can see my games on eximeno.com/juegos.html (in Spanish most of them, sorry)
Flight of the Necrovoyager
La Petite Mort
[spoiler]5
In this game you get to select one of five monsters to pilot a spacecraft on an exploratory mission to an uninhabited planet. I liked how bizarre this concept was. I played through all five different characters. My biggest criticism is how uneventful the trip was. You have about thirty turns or so to select one of three options each turn, two of the options pretty much give you the same information, so you really only have the third option which is you character’s signature action. Many of these signature actions were either repetitive or missed there comedic target, a good number of them were funny so that was nice. In conclusion, I would have liked to have been able to do more interesting things as a vampire piloting a spacecraft across the galaxy than checking my wardrobe, but it was still a neat idea with a fair number of payoffs.[/spoiler]
Thanks for playing & reviewing. Flight of the Necrovoyager is very bare bones and not that great at the moment yeah. Only the lich is fleshed out with any significant content and only the skeleton offers a different ending. I used it as an excuse to learn some twine tricks as I’d yet to release anything in it. I’m planning a post-comp version with more content.
Thank you for making it! I am also glad to hear that this game idea was the inspiration for you to learn something new.
Flight of the Necrovoyager spoiler
[spoiler]I played through the vampire which was hit or miss, the skeleton which was pretty funny actually, and the dracolich which was pretty terrible which was why I didn’t play the other two paths. I will go back to play the others now based on your comment, and adjust my review if appropriate.
I played the other two paths, and the skeleton was my favorite path, keep up the good work![/spoiler]
Howled House
La Petite Mort
[spoiler]8.75
I’m not entirely sure what any of this was, but I liked it.[/spoiler]
Scars
La Petite Mort
[spoiler]6
In this game you play the role of a sales associate living in a world where the social contract on lying is enforced through extrajudicial cutting. Lying is thematically associated with the harm of cutting as well as it acting as a badge of honor for how many people you lied to or who hurt you. The writing was fine, I just don’t believe the author sold the story to me. First, who would agree to live in such an absurd society? And then, assuming that was just one of those that’s just the way it is scenarios, that practice wouldn’t fly for long before you started encountering some pretty serious problems…People don’t like getting cut.[/spoiler]
Honeysuckle
[spoiler]9.75
A sorcerer’s apprentice gets more than she bargained for when she decides to marry her professor. I really enjoyed the writing here, probably some of my favorite of the competition. The plot was engaging, the characters very realistic, and the beetles and wardrobe reveals were notably creepy, I loved it all. I deducted the quarter point for the endings, I normally love cliffhanger or vague endings because it gives you something to chew on after the story is over. The problem here is that it just ended too soon, and too flat, and didn’t leave me with the heebie-jeebies, it was just very anticlimactic. I feel one well crafted, ambiguous, and goosebumps inducing sentence at the end of each of the cliffhanger endings would have buttoned this game up nicely. Overall an exceptional game.[/spoiler]
A Checkered Haunting
La Petite Mort
[spoiler]8
I like puzzles, so I found that interesting. Another thing I found interesting is how the puzzles drove the story in this game, where the story drives the puzzles in most other games. I like being forced to plan all of my moves in advance, and I also enjoy how these puzzles provide the illusion of choice when in actuality most of your moves are forced in order to prevent obtaining a losing state. The first four puzzles were really easy, that is probably my biggest complaint with the game. I am pretty sure the fifth and final puzzle, programmerville, is unwinnable. I believe that has to do with the limbo theme of the game, that was interesting. The first time I came to programmerville, I mapped out probably at least a dozen paths in my head and the closest thing I could come to was one shy of a complete board. Maybe I missed something? I proceeded to a forced losing state a couple of times and got similar results on different boards, and then a “wild goose chase” message which confirmed my suspicions. I also feel that programmerville is a play on the fact that a programmer will never be able write a perfect program and that the closest they’ll ever get to is “good enough” before quitting out and doing something else? Overall, an enjoyable experience.[/spoiler]
Train of Life
La Petite Mort
[spoiler]7.25
You play a scientist who decides to pull the plug on 90% of humanity by unleashing a zombie apocalypse that burns itself out in 140 hours. The story takes place after the fact as the scientist relays his version of the events to a couple of government agents, all the while working around his own culpability of the crime. How it tied into the train story was neat. I guess where this story loses point for me is all of the problems that it creates. I can think of a number of problems off the top of my head, but the two that stand out the most is first who would bury the 290 million bodies that this incident caused? You can’t just leave them to the buzzards, it would be a health disaster, the disease, the smell, carnivorous animals going rogue after getting a taste of human flesh, it would be a complete nightmare. The second major problem would be that releasing an undead army on the population for 6 days would produce wildly random results, not the releasing the elites from the burdens of the commons that I believe the author was trying to take the story. Overall, this was still a very entertaining game.[/spoiler]
Bring Me A Head!
Le Grand Guignol
[spoiler]10
You play the servant of a Royal on a quest to provide them with a fresh head in a bizarre hellscape. This game has been the creepiest one of the comp so far for me, it was decadently grotesque, and felt great to read. The reveal at the end was also lovely. Luxurious. The author managed to achieve a tremendous amount of value in their writing, a few words would be used to achieve the same affect as a full paragraph written by others. The end result is that the story continued festering in my brain long after the words had been read, and the mound of words at the end became an even more powerful image.[/spoiler]
Vlad the Impala
Le Grand Guignol
[spoiler]9
An escape the room game based around mistaken identity. The campy writing worked in that it was fun and playful. I love escape the room games, but this game loses a point for being too easy, but it was still an escape the room game, so that was nice.
Also, I didn’t care for the wonky fonted e’s.[/spoiler]
Thanks! Based on your feedback (and a PM in this forum) I fixed the behavior of 2 meta-verbs.
[spoiler]QUIT and RESTART now let you know that the 5th area’s layout is not a bug.
The game probably needs a few other tweaks, too, but I think that helps the player not restart and lose progress.[/spoiler]
Thank you for making it!
I didn’t so much think that it was a bug as I did that it was tied into the theme of limbo. I thought that was the point, but I couldn’t figure out a winning command, and I thought it may have been something like “quit” on the 5th board, but that just quit the game.
Psychomanteum
Le Grand Guignol
[spoiler]8.50
You are locked inside a small mirrored room as part of a Halloween celebration, you only have 3 matches to see with, a slate to communicate with, and your reflection is not your reflection. The music was eerie, the story was one of the spookier ones of the competition, but I just felt like there was not enough interaction with the reflection. It seemed like generic emote responses and some mention of a secret that I couldn’t pry out of it with the slate. I may have missed something. Overall a very nice game.[/spoiler]