Sunday, October 11, 2020

Savor: IFcomp 2020

Savor is a choice-based horror entry by Ed Nobody.

I appreciate the technical work that went into this entry's presentation. It includes music and monochrome images in the background, but it also takes the rare step of allowing you to use keyboard controls to select choices and advance the story.

Not all of the technical details improved the experience.

You can hold the spacebar to speed up the timed text in this game, but that also makes choices for you.

Some choices are enclosed in red boxes with a warning to choose carefully, but choices offered outside those warnings can still end your story early — it was challenging for me to determine which choices would be meaningful.

From a narrative perspective, I was unable to enjoy the story that this entry wanted to tell. That might have been a personal failing. 

In my defense, a lot of the text describes terrible pain inflicted by a mysterious curse. But as a player, the option to avoid the pain by quitting is there the whole time! After facing extensive descriptions of suffering and the open contemplation of suicide, it was cleaner and less anguished to just end the game. 

This entry may be interesting for people who enjoy rural scare stories and works that dwell on the themes of life, death, and renewal that frequently appear in farm horror. I found more than one ending, but mysteries involving slaughter and unnatural harvests remained. The person who unravels them will not be me.

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