Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Nothing puts a smile on my face like bad ideas, dubious occult practices, and familiar strangers in the quiet hours of the morning. This quick interactive fiction delivers on the promise of the Onyx Oasis: I'm all in. As I played through each of the branches I noticed some similarities and gather points, but I'm impressed by the elegance of some of the responses to player choice and how they recontextualize passages that are otherwise the same. A few of the side characters are shallow, but the fun of piecing together a magic spell from scraps of paper is well worth revisiting. The first time I got to the ending my small hairs were standing on end and I knew I had to play again. This game makes clever use of its limited word count to satisfy player curiosity *just* enough. Fantastic work by the developer, and I'm proud to see this entry on the map.
• This was an engaging, satisfying game. I appreciated how the narrative structure was streamlined, still giving the player something to interact with. Bottlenecks happened at ideal places, which meant that the narrative wasn’t unnecessarily bloated (and that saves both the writer and dev team time and resources). The raccoon branch in particular delighted me, and I went through the whole game multiple times on the lookout for more twists. The openness of the ending allowed it to work smoothly with all three major branches, which was a great display of efficiency.