Reviews from

in the past


an excellent first foray into games, post-disclosure, devil's night is presented as an intimate, personal experience - and it is! it did a lot to bring me into the experience, one that, even though i've never experienced, i've seen so many times from outside. i don't think talking about the story does this justice, it just need to be experienced, and there aren't many other aspects to speak of since it's a twine game.

as a first work, it does occasionally suffer what i can only assume is uncertainty in artistic voice, an occasional lack of complete commitment toward, or perhaps confidence in, a single coherent vision. presentation-wise it's also a bit unpolished, but as a twine game jam entry i really can't fault it for that. all i can say is that, i think the biggest obstacle to roxy as a game dev at the point this was made is a lack of confidence. looking forward to continuing the ludography soon

Post-Disclosure, Devil's Night foi uma coisa que eu mais apreciei do que realmente gostei. Talvez esteja mais pra um livro interativo do que um jogo, até mesmo pros padrões de jogos desse tipo, mas não irei reduzir o valor da obra por causa disso. A história dele é sobre uma garota se encontrando com seus amigos online em uma festa de halloween na vida real. Como alguém que nunca fez amigos online (a única pessoa com quem fiz amizade online foi o meu cunhado), eu não me identifiquei com as situações do enredo. Eu sei que poder se identificar com uma história não é algo que a torna melhor ou pior, e sei que falar mal de uma por não poder se identificar é um tipo de crítica bem mesquinha, e não quero cair nessa mesma armadilha. A linguagem que o texto usa é próxima do romantismo, e pra quem curte esse tipo de escrita é um prato cheio, mas como não é o meu caso, não me agrada tanto. A forma com que a narrativa explora ansiedade é até interessante, com o seu uso do texto e das mudanças de cor do background, mas as relações da protagonista com seus amigos não foram tão bem exploradas quanto deviam. Eu sei muito bem que a forma que avaliei e critiquei ele possa ser meio injusta, e pelo que escrevi e pela nota que dei pode até afastar pessoas que poderiam até gostar e se conectar com esse jogo, mas não deixe que isso o faça evitá-lo. Post-Disclosure, Devil's night é uma obra bem específica, alguns irão se conectar com ela e outros não, e mesmo com as minhas críticas meio injustas, não tiram o seu valor, e caso queira tentar, você pode simplesmente jogar pelo navegador do seu PC e dura de uns 5-10 minutos, não irá te fazer mal algum.

Prós: O uso da ansiedade pelo texto é até interessante; A forma em que o background muda de cor dependendo das emoções da cena é admirável.
Contras: O texto é meio meloso; Os personagens não são tão bem explorados quanto deviam.

I'm a cismale, and at the risk of writing one of those cringey, self-absorbed "oh I'm trying so hard to be an ally" shmucks, I don't exactly find myself going after trans-aligned media so often. Sometimes it's the dumb "I don't think I'd relate to it" 'excuse', other times it's mainly cause I don't think they like, outright appeal to me in terms of genres. Still, I do at least try to get through them when they hit my marks, Matrix being a go-to example which I like and appreciate (yet to have seen the fourth one though), and though I have yet to actually mention this anywhere online, seeing the queer allegory of Serial Experiments Lain unfold in real-time - literally even, since I binged it all in a day - was pretty fuckin awe-inspiring. Hopefully in October I finally get around to watching Ginger Snaps since I've seen and have researched its impact on transfolk as well.

Pushing all that aside, I am glad to have gone through this regardless. While the prose and general style is a wee bit expository and not exactly my taste of romanticism/flowery shit, I find Roxy S. does a pretty admirable job invoking a sense of anxiety, especially with how different colors and pause-breaks affect the reading. The discomfort of meeting online friends for the first time, not knowing how they'd react IRL compared to Discord or even Twitter, is a very real thing to get distressed over, and I seriously cannot imagine how much more troubling and worrying that'd be for someone that came out to them, and is essentially showing their real self for the first time. All things considered, I hope she and whoever else ended up feeling this hardcore are doing well, and at least met the people they love and cherish in a positive and wonderful manner.

''It could be that real comfort, the kind of coziness that we spend our lives searching for, can only be found in contrast to hardship, to worry and anxiety.'' goes fucking hard I said it

"Irrealidade estava a seu alcance"

À todos aqueles que conseguiram tornar o real digital das comunidades online em irreal alcançável do mundo físico, fica a recomendação.


The subject matter and theming is interesting, Halloween first time meet up with people you only know online, who you've come out to as trans recently. The anxiety of the character is well framed as well using Twine's ability to autoscroll text to make the protagonist Alyssa seem like she's stumbling over her words. Alyssa is shown to be quite paranoid throughout the course of the text about how others are percieving her, taking passive remarks and reading deep into them.

This text is reminiscent of a piece of writing out of the Romanticism period like Frankenstein or The Sorrows of Young Werther which focus on descriptive flowery language to reflect high passions and feelings. In this case the main qualities being reflected are dissociation and anxiety which is why I use those 2 literary examples because I would say they have similar emotional thematic tones. Here though its utilized in reflection of the genuinely mundane moment rather than a big existential tragedy and trauma. Although there is still reflection on transition and the paranoia with being perceived, the mundane party atmosphere is meant to quell this.

Anybody who is tied to romanticist literature would probably tell you it's effective but I find that whole movement overwrought, oversincere, and on the nose. While I can see the artistic reason for it, there's an excessive use of alliteration and sophisticated words like 'japery' and 'olfactory' which are resonant yet distract from discription and quite simply don't work for me. It led to parsing issues which is exasperated further in twine where only a paragraph of text is on the screen at once. I would be remiss not to mention this is far from the only Twine game with this issue though.

I'm much more tied to naturalism or modernist writing. Where the narration of the mind is simple and usually reflecting on the past rather than the current moment. So you could chalk that up to a preferential thing. Darkest Dungeon has a narrator who speaks with this kind of paranoid sophistry to, and it was one of the main reasons I never finished that game. Mainly I would have liked to know more about Alyssa's friends, and in particular I think the monologue with Natalie is both simplistic and unrealistic. I think given what we know there would be a few more attempts by Alyssa to downplay Natilie's regrets, or given they are all Discord nerds that it would be more stuttering and contemplative rather than 1 giant unbroken monologue. This monologue would work if it was typed to somebody instead but that's not how it went down.

On the positives, there's an immaculate use of color throughout the text, which soothes into the tone perfectly. I also think that when Alyssa's narration was actually given a direct voice, the reflections were really cool, for example this passage on comfort:

"In a way, that’s sort of the implicit cost of comfort, right? After all, what is comfort without some sort of negative to base it on? While this film… isn’t particularly fun, being part of it, part of this moment, is what makes the comfiness of friendship, of family, of life, worth it. Like, for all the talk of safety and happiness, it’s really at its most safe, most happy, most intimate and welcoming, in the face of discomfort, right? "

While I'm far too pessimistic to agree with it, I think the hesitancy and uncertainty matches that sensation of wistfulness that usually goes with the holidays, which is one of the enduring reasons we associate these times with Peanut specials. It's within that window that I see a text that, while I personally don't have much love for, can see it as an acceptable reflection of holiday alienation in relationship to queerness. If you like this, I recommend Three Lesbians in a Winter Special which performs a similar tone and subject matter.

At the end of the day, I'm glad to have another text I can add to this list. Twine games are really neat, and I think it's a great medium for the biggest nerds on here to get more familiar with the difficulties of story design when it comes to game immersion. I also think that seeing or having to figure out how to critique the work of our peers is sort of fascinating, am I treating this work with a similar level of respect and consideration that I did of Presentable Liberty or No One Can Ever Know? And also how fair can we be about judgements and criticism in comparison to both debut work, and work made in time constraints? These are heavy questions, especially because comparatively I feel like this is the type of work that certain goons on the site would openly deride and degrade for being sincere and internal.

Perhaps my main takeaway here is I always feel particularly disappointed when I'm dropped into a world and don't have a firm grasp on the characters I was interested in by the end of it. I'd love to know more about the history of almost all the characters and so it's a shame I only have the fragment to go off of. As a result, I hope to see what else the developer can make outside of time constraints since Game Jams are by design not friendly to polish anyway.

Something by a friend, didn't really find myself with a lot to say but it's pretty nifty. Makes me think back to when I met up with my girlfriend a few months ago, probably the happiest I've ever been. Definitely need to make similar plans again some day.

Just gonna be brutally honest and say that it started kind of shaky but didn't take long to find its groove, managing to hit a few soft spots of mine with a touch of verbiage that rides that line of feeling perhaps slightly pretentious without entirely crossing over it. Basically, it gives me the fuzzies.

Excellent especially for a first published piece, I hope to see more.

Happy Autumn <3

Really comfy and very personal-feeling read. Love the way that it captures and displays Alyssa's emotions through it's descriptive text. I feel like there are people who will resonate with this on a much more personal level than I could, but I connected with it quite a bit. It almost feels wrong for me to really give it a rating, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Upon re reading my original review I found it to be kinda cringe so Im rewriting it to just urge people who are reading this to give it a go. Its a VN detailing a personal experience I am completely unfamiliar with and I think thats a good thing to experience.

It's a strange experience to go into a game, fully expecting it to be relatable and then it just... isn't.
This happened to me once before, when I played We Know The Devil.
How do I rate a game like that?

While procrastinating earlier this week I was browsing old Jimquisitions and stumbled across the “100% Objective review”, a video where they make fun of the concept of an objective review. Their original review of Final Fantasy XIII was incredibly negative and they got harassed for it not being “objective” so they made a “review” that was just listing facts. While reading the comments of that video I stumbled across something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but someone was saying something to the extent of “If you were an English teacher, would you assign grades purely based on whether you like a paper or not? Hopefully not, when grading a paper, you need to put aside personal bias and grade it on the quality of its content. Same for a video game, you’re supposed to subjectively evaluate its features independent of personal bias.”
Putting aside the fact that English papers aren’t art and reviewing isn’t grading, that sentiment strikes me as odd. I don’t rate based on technical execution. A lot of games I have rated very highly have some pretty massive flaws. I sometimes joke that Nier Automata would be an awful game if it wasn’t also my favourite game. My ratings are pretty much exclusively based on how much I enjoyed something.

So, how do I rate Post-Disclosure, Devil’s Knight?
Based solely on enjoyment it’s probably like a 5/10 I guess.
But rating it as such would feel incredibly unfair. It’s not the game’s fault I went into it expecting something it could never deliver on. It’s not the game’s fault my lived experiences are so vastly different from what it’s trying to portray that I don’t relate to anything that is happening.
Besides, aren’t I always annoyed when cis people ignore trans stories because “it wouldn’t be relatable anyway”? Aren’t I being just as bad right now?
And I know this game can be relatable to people. I hope that Roxy relates to it, would be weird otherwise. Kye’s excellent review shows very well just how much this story resonates with her. If I slap a label like “two and a half stars” on this, I feel like I’m invalidating their experiences. Even worse, I might end up scaring someone off this game who would have ended up loving it.

The objective Final Fantasy XIII review has the following line:
“If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and like it, then you like Final Fantasy XIII. If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and you don’t like it, then you don’t like Final Fantasy XIII. It has things in it that some people might enjoy but other people who have different ideas of what is enjoyable may not actually enjoy it.”
As much as that is very obvious satire, it’s pretty much exactly how I feel about PDDK. I personally didn’t like it all that much but I know other people will.
Fortunately, unlike FFXIII, it’s a free game that will only take you 10 minutes to play. So why not give it a try, see if you’ll end up enjoying it? What’s the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen is that you could end up writing a really weird review about the process of reviewing things and spend over an hour with that apparently.

This review contains spoilers

At first I thought the choice you make mid-game added nothing but on replay it actually changes the main character's cosplay. This brings it to something I enjoyed but didn't have thoughts on to an A+, no notes, medium-defining work. The choose-your-own-adventure formula has peaked and it will be a while before we get innovation this distruptive and brilliant again.

I met my boyfriend in a Discord server for an indie game.

It's a bit silly when I put it that way. I bonded with him and fell in love with him because we both played a video game. As someone with a lot of neurodivergencies, though, the medium of a chat client made things... easier. I had a lot more control over how I presented myself, a lot less worry about my appearance or how I was carrying myself or the sound of my own voice. It was safe.

A little over a year after I first met him, I visited him in his home country thousands of miles away.

I won't ever forget the feeling of being in the hotel room, knowing he was arriving, and just waiting for him to show up.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

What if he doesn't like your dress?

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

Six minutes.

Wait, his mom is coming too?

Seven minutes.

Eight minutes.

You don't know what you would say to his mom! You barely even speak the same language as her!

Nine minutes.

This was all a mistake.

Ten minutes.

Maybe you should just-

I was thrust into it, regardless of my own preconceptions of "readiness". I survived, as unlikely as it sounds. Though it's something I wouldn't want to experience ever again, it's something I likely will, over and over. And over and over, it will be okay.

Post-Disclosure, Devil's Night understands this. It simply is this. That worry that those you care about in one space won't love you anymore in another, that they won't see you as the same. But the truth is that they're just as scared as you are - evocative prose in their head or not. It's a terrifying, exhausting, and draining experience, but ultimately a beautifully human one.

I wouldn't give it up for anything there is.

I should note that as a proofreader credited in the game, my perspective is inevitably a bit biased. Still, I think Post-Disclosure, Devil's Night is full of colorful writing, good imagery, and a really good grasp on depicting emotion in every scene.

It's a short read, and I think it's cozy and with much to relate to one way or another for many of us whose friendships are forged online more often than off these days.

All in all: I'm glad this exists. If you're reading this, whoever you are, go create some art! I'll love to see it.

really great short little visual novel!

I read all of this in my mind with Orson Welles' voice

you're never gonna guess how i feel about this one gang

game can be found here: https://squigglydot.itch.io/postdisclosure-devilsnight