by Vitalii Blinov. 30th place, IFComp 2022.

Confusing, slow, lets me be a tourist in a fantastic place.

I don’t particularly like it (surrealism isn’t my thing) but of the surreal stuff I’ve played it’s pretty good. It’s a weird world that I was happy to spend a little time in, but some quality of life things (inventory interactions and going back to the room over and over to change the time) felt time-wastey in a way that didn’t add to the game for me. So kind of interesting, maybe not “fun.”

What’s working for me:

• Clear explanation of affordances up front, including save options.
• It has credited playtesters!
• There’s a “notes” and “inventory” feature, which promises more depth than a typical Twine game in terms of possibility space. This turns out to be somewhat true, especially on the “notes” side of things where we build up a sizable inventory to try out.
• There’s an Alice-in-Wonderlandness to this world, and especially the feeling of being Alice, confronted with a lot of strangeness and no guidance on how to deal with it. That feeling itself might be what the author is aiming at; if so, well done!
• Cool character designs and descriptions. I got very different mental images for all of them.
• Wow, this is extensive. I spent two hours on it and then peeked at the walkthrough; I’ve probably only seen a quarter of it.

What’s not working for me:

• The music was charming for a few seconds and then quickly got grating and repetitive, so I muted it. I checked back in later and the music had changed, but to another very repetitive loop, and I turned it off again.
• I struggled a lot with some of the puzzles, and I’m not totally sure if they’re poorly hinted or if I’m just very out-of-practice for this sort of game. For example, I probably should have gotten the sun/clock thing faster, but I’d mostly used “notes” as dialogue cues before this point so I didn’t connect the dots that I had to reference an idea at the empty room to unlock the ability to interact with the painting.
• Shortly after the first day/night change I’m looking for matches, and the only thing to do was walk around and talk to absolutely everybody. Sometimes this is fine (I find it a less-than-welcome trope in JRPGs) but this case seemed especially egregious because they were all discouraging me, saying “there are no matches in this town.” Normally when this happens in a game it’s a hint that some lateral thinking is necessary (e.g. I can’t get a live chicken, maybe a quill pen will do?) but in this case there is a person who will just give you matches. So that felt like an unfriendly misdirect.
• After a while the notes-inventory is actually kind of annoying. It’s frustrating to go into my bag and try everything just to make dialogue choices appear. Something like this might be appropriate to a detective game, but for this experience I wish thoughts would be automatically available in the main interface if they were relevant.
• There’s a lot of back-and-forth movement in the design of the early part of the game I could play, and movement with the map was kind of awkward, with many clicks required to go back to the pub, go back to the room, toggle day/night, then go back to wherever I was puzzling.