i get most of my freeware from terry cavanagh and weird fucking games
i could not guess the phone number
twine from... that early era of twine when everything was like, bizarre, abstract, queer fetishism - this was a p*rpentine jam entry. fascinating nightmare experience. behrendt has seemingly left online and as such the link is to the wayback machine ver of the twine.
delightful flight job sim. go from place to place helping weird guests at your ice hotel out + communicate with them through fixed speech buttons. really quite lovely use of spaces - the Spar in Fogsmeade, based off this german bakery operating out of a long-dead supermarket!! the photography was lovely. the TTS voiceacting really brings the alien-ness of the environment and situation home - i adore how morose yet genuine the pilot sounds. couldnt properly finish it because i got a bug with the snowflake graphic covering my screen but i got very close to the end. i have little to say about this one but it's really good
personality test for sickos. fortunately i am one such sicko and i DO want a dead-eyed woman to spike my drink and turn me into a devil filled with bloodlust and leave me thinking of nothing but her
non-combat rpgmaker about cleaning paintings in a gallery in purgatory which allows the soul trapped inside to move on. rave reviews, but i didn't like it much! the ai generated art was really genuinely cool, and the soundtrack lovely, and it was all infused with a decent amount of good humour... i love a setting themed to a person, too! spaces; levels indicative of a soul, a life once lived! theoretically i SHOULD love this; but the dialogue was... mm, straining too hard to inject character into every line? it had accents and tics abound, so every tragic story felt forced, and the overall tone was uneven in what felt like a very unintentional way. like, i get that it's hard to create character when your character art and sprites are barely comprehensible ai art, but... not this much. some restraint, please. even if the game hadn't opened by telling me it was a student project i feel like i would have gathered by how unsubtle and creaky the writing was. wasn't really convinced by the painting-cleaning metaphor either, but - i stopped at painting 3, which is The Scary One, because i wasn't impressed by the game enough to want to let it scare me - maybe it explained itself later?
(shouting from the bottom of a well) if you want to play a game about jumping into portraits can i suggest Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin? you can do combo attacks in that one
super short fmv game where you're a recently dead person having your consciousness uploaded to the cloud. graphic design was perfect, and the fmv characters were ai-generated, creating a perfectly uncanny look that meshed with the We Uploaded Your Brain To Amazon Web Services plot. genuinely funny and it got like 4 Big laughs out of me - the robotic scriptreading really worked for its timing, somehow. got compared to an interactive black mirror episode elsewhere, but i think in a post-'wot if yer da ran on batteries world' that comes across as mean
old mac interface styled point and click sort of thing about investigating a city of ghosts. presentation truly lovely, writing charming if blunt (esl + very short game though, i'll give it a pass).i'm not particularly sure why the format of an old macintosh interface and geocities webrings was chosen, though, as it has nothing to do with the setting or plot? i think... small, relocatable squares of text and imagery a la computer windows can be very beneficial for a game where you poke around and talk to people and acquire lots of little pieces of information, but to actively ape a specific OS adds little when it's... just not about that. actually i thought on it more while i was writing this and it could in fact be an additional layer to the narrative about being stuck in the past, like the ghosts going about their routines. regardless, it's very impressive and pleasant - the criticism is pure thought experiment (not the right word but you know. not a value judgement) on interface, nothing actually wrong with the game itself. not sure if anachronistic but i wanted a scrollbar on the windows, because my mousewheel doesn't work and i had to drag the window down to scroll like it was a touchscreen and that was strangely uncomfortable? at least let me drag up like if i was using middle click.... interestingly this came out before hypnospace, a game i liked far less than i wanted to