Glad I finally got round to this! The music is really gorgeous and lulling in this one. Your games are some the only ones that actually give me the same feeling of weird pc shareware that I played as a teenager. Did you ever play 'Dare to Dream'?
This is super charming. I love how you have made the environment messy/squalid without it being visually confusing for the player. The only thing I'd personally change would be for the icon to be selected on the selection screen to be highter/brighter rather than duller/dimmer, but that might just be me.
Along with Ligotti I think your work is one of the only creative responses to Lovecraft that manages to circumvent his racism while maintaining the core of the existential horror - no mean feat! This one gave me a similar sensation to when I played 'The Cosmology of Kyoto' for the first time.
I do think an unabridged audiobook version sounds like a plan, thanks! I have an abridged one I've listened to and it really helps with the lyricism. I hadn't realised that there were so many snatches of traditional Irish songs and hymnals and such!
I'm probably morally obliged to play through all of this because of not attending all the lectures on Ulysses during my first year of undergraduate and going on to become a lecturer... still never having finished reading Ulysses.
Can't believe this is almost a decade old. Dang. I've really slipped in terms of my keeping up to date with IF or Twine more generally. This is still one of the best, honestly up there with Emily Short and Adam Cadre and other stalwarts. I selfishly hope academia doesn't keep you so busy you won't make more games.
This is delightful in a really horrible way! It's not since I first discovered iNSCAPE CD-ROMs like The Dark Eye and Bad Day on the Midway that I've felt that midpoint between attraction and repulsion from a game. I love that grandpa seems half way between a kratt of Estonian folklaw and a parasitic alien from Cronenberg or Carpenter! Such amazing work.
Sorry, been in hospital with intestinal problems for a couple of days. adamwhybray@gmail.com works fine for now (must really replace gmail sometime soon)
This is pretty wonderful. I love the increasinfly hauntological turn of creepypasta-urban legend style horror. I guess it's been there since 'Marble Hornets' and 'Candle Cove' and before, but your commitment to the analog aesthetic here is really impressive. Thank you.
Long Live the New Flesh, Batman! It was like an Artaudian hypertext retelling of Merlin Sheldrake's 'Entangled Life'. I like to imagine that the man on the table was the late Terence McKenna.
Incidentally, if you havent listened to the radio soundscapes of Gregory Whitehead, I'm pretty sure you'd be keen: https://gregorywhitehead.net/
I guess this was yours just from the title and front page image, which shows what an immediately recognisable style you've managed to develop, which is really swish considering the genres you cross!
I've worked out a way, I hope, to package four of my old Klik 'n' Play game experiments with an open-source freeware Windows emulator to make them accessible for those on Windows 10.
Text box formatting in the 'Gout Pony' game is a little corrupted and the font for the title screen of 'Therapy Game' has been converted to Wingdings, though that's fine.
I probably won't ever find the time to remake these, but I think 'Therapy Game' is a good formal proof of concept of procedural rhetoric!
To be honest, what I really want is for one of the ideas in one of these games to spark off something better by all of you more talented designers and programmers! XD
I don't think there are currently many concept album game tie-ins yet, for instance!
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'Therapy Game' - Attempt at an embodied metaphor - playing breakout as breaking down the wall of repression between client and therapist. The idea is you should uncover some of the traumas but not all of them (i.e. some repression is necessary!), judging this by what the client says.
'Gout Pony's Family Gouting - The Game' - Each track of the album inspired a level in the game. The music has been adapted/converted into MIDI format.
'Sadness: The Game' - Mainly an attempt at making a game led by my intuition very late at night.
'OCD Game' - I wanted to evoke my experiences of having OCD and intrusive thoughts so the sound design was crucial. It was also important that it looped. Hopefully the way of solving the game reflects good C.B.T. practice.
That's so very kind of you! Sion did a wonderful job with the art so it's worth playing even for that I believe! ^^ I really hope you enjoy it and that it lives up to at least some of your expectations! It's quite a lot big than most players have realised, I think - there's two main branching paths early on, one which leads to a journey by boat and adventures beyond and one which involved exploring a mansion. It gets more puzzley and properly exploration based as it goes on and I became better at coding! XD
More the responses in the comp itself TBH - I was troubled that more than one commentator felt there was sexist and/or racist humour in the game - doubtlessly, there are racist and sexist aspects to Poe's work and I tried to offer a critical commentary on this, or provide ironic deconstructions, without misrepresenting the original texts. The difficulty in doing this is why I would never attempt such a game with Lovecraft.
Otherwise, it seemed like many people experienced the game as "puzzle less"... in truth, I think the game's design gets more interesting and complex the deeper you get into it, especially in the island section, where there is a fair amount of variable tracking and what I would consider puzzles... I'd like to think that familiarity with the tropes/ structures of CYOA (and especially Fighting Fantasy) books should allow the player/ reader not to brute force the game to reach a desired conclusion.
That is to say, there *are* some unfair endings and responses that cannot be usefully predicted (to keep in with the style of CYOA and also for humour and to allow more illustrations!) but I think if you play it as "cautious but not cowardly" (as those old books often seemed to encourage) you'll probably do okay!
Thanks for this. I was getting a little dispirited about making games in the future, in truth, as I felt like 'Evermore' didn't really click for most people (or the 2 hour competition playtime limit meant that a lot of players didn't realise the sheer expanse of the game) so it really means a lot to know that there are folks out there who enjoyed it! Cheers!
