Ratings and Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

A neat and interesting Twine story that casts you in an unusual role. There's an interesting story to be told. I was promised seven, but got one...where are the other six?

I wish I could ask all Twine authors to increase the font size when their story only takes up the upper sliver of page in the Sugarcane theme.

This Twine narrative by Merritt Kopas is a stellar example of how the interactive medium can communicate things that a standard book or poem or treatise cannot. It's kind of a standard thing Twine has become - a place where people with poetry or just imagery can write it out and sort of get things off their chest.

This one is extremely well done. There are pauses built in, and some ambiguity about whether you are supposed to click something or not at times, but this serves to make the incident that Merritt Kopas relays feel like a very personal telling, with all the hesitation and occasional tangents that might be interjected into having words with a friend who will listen.

There are also times when the script spawned another window full of what appears to be twee/twinecode. I am unsure if this was supposed to happen this way, but seeing the Twine broken out and reading some of the English sentences within the code I think supplement the personal feeling in that I was reading behind the fourth wall and seeing what Merritt actually wrote behind the flash of html. I hope I was supposed to be seeing the code and it wasn't just a glitch.

This is not a game so much as a short experience where you can connect with the author and perhaps empathize or sympathize with raw feeling and experience put forth. I can't say I really enjoy this type of presentation in itself and hope to read lots more of them...but the piece is definitely worth a read if you enjoy raw image-filled prose poetry that can exist in an artist's head.

This story is very directly written and horrifies with emotion and monstrous implications. It feels like some of the moody J-horror short films without splattering blood, but rather the rumbling, queasy burn of ideas in your brain where you don't know if the monster is internal or external to your point of view.

Very nice use of Twine. I'm starting to think one of my requisites for any Twine story is going to be that the author *must* style the text outside of the default - at minimum, MAKE THE TEXT BIGGER. If your story only takes up the top quarter of the screen, you have problems.

This is about the right length for a choice-based scenario, and nicely paced between text and choices. The writing is not indulgent, but gives enough details to get the goosebumps across.

This is a great use of the Quest engine for CYOA masquerading as a correctional class to teach you about corporate personhood. I almost don't think I was smart enough to play the game, but it's a very tongue-in-cheek and surprisingly-well researched fractured history lesson.

And there's a scene where you play Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as he tumbles down a slide into the National Archive.

No plot, but some raw emotions on display. Thank you for making the text big!

The Axolotl Project is a choice-based narrative written in Twine. You are a lowly intern researcher working as an animal handler on the moon where research into new drugs is being conducted. Per usual in these types of stories, a sinister plot reveals itself, and you must untangle the threads and save yourself and humanity.

This game got hold of my attention and absorbed me. The prose is well-written and never indulgent. There's a surprising amount of agency, and I never got stuck so the narrative never lost momentum. I'm not sure if I was funneled, but after the exploratory first act, I was always given a well-timed nudge on what to do next. I never felt as though I was being forced to the conclusion, but once the diegetic hints start coming (they're all explained in the denouement) you appreciate them.

My only slight gripe is the story was in the default Twine font and format (I think it's called Jonah? The dark one that clears the screen after each choice). I always appreciate when authors make the font a little bit larger and more readable. There was only once or twice when the text filled more than the upper fourth of the screen, so that would be my only suggestion: style the HTML a bit more nicely.

I went from skimming some of the descriptions at the beginning to actually fully invested and interested in the story that Samantha Vick was telling, as well as her characters. So many of the Twine offerings have very abstracted plot lines or provide just so much metaphorical poetry (which Twine does very well), or are so poorly written that you may as well not bother. So if you've never read a good fully-fleshed out and plotted narrative in a CYOA-type wrapper, then The Axolotl Project is here as one of the best and most recent examples of how Twine can be used to tell an actual linear, non-abstract story.

This is a very well-written set of erotic gay interludes that branch off from you being in a club and making choices to pursue several different men or male couples. It's well-paced, and definitely worth a look if you're into what it has to offer. The stories are kinky and idealized without guilt so they each make for a quick hot read. The choices are well-laid out, and essentially involve you selecting whom you pair off with. There's not a ton of agency, but the writing is very good and would suffer if you were making lots of incremental choices.

This is a very simple Twine story with a smidgin of interaction. Usually this type of thing gets boring, but I found this excellently written, and an interesting story about two brothers. One uses magic, and magic causes pain. The more powerful the magic, the more chance it can kill the wielder.

The story isn't about this specifically, but it shadows the relationship and the obliquely subtle plot. This feels like a tiny fragment of a much larger world, and I enjoyed the little glimpse of it that this story gives. I hope this writer has more to show us because the story is achingly lovely and melancholic.

This sounds as if it's going to be a lofty and important game. The description on the website is a good column-foot long (see above), and reads as if it were lifted directly from a world history textbook. Sounds like the author did a lot of research. I'm not into historical games, but this sounded like too crazy of a concept not to at least see what it is. There's no way I'll have time to play this kind of deep historical "what if" scenario.

I needn't have worried. I'm presented with the situation of possible nukes in Cuba, and a menu of about five choices. "Nuke Russia" is one of them. I choose "Blockade Cuba". Game ends, and I'm berated for picking the most boring option. "Do Nothing" ends the game also, the nukes are never launched. The other aggressive options aren't much deeper than two clicks, and are pretty much "You get nuked back" with various US regions flattened and different countries emerging victorious…"Break out the tea and crumpets" is displayed when England remains as the only superpower. Is this meant as a joke game?

One of the pictures has a sideways page number on the edge, so I get the feeling this might have been a class assignment where someone lifted pictures and text from a book. None of the outcomes (or any of the original text in the game for that matter) goes into anything like thoughtful speculation or extensive detail about what might have really happened if history played out differently. It's just "CLICK Russia nukes you". This doesn't seem at all like it was meant as parody, unless you take an additional meta-step back and look at it as a humorous example of a highschooler's last minute "what do I submit for this history assignment due tomorrow that I have not done any work on yet??" type of thing.

A several-move CYOA made with Quest. This will take less than five minutes. There are a couple of choices that you, as a door, have to make about who to let pass through and who to disallow. This could be expanded into something really cool (perhaps sort of a reductionist "Papers, Please") if the author chose to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)Shows promise...for example after letting a child through, and blocking two suspicious men, Michael Jackson comes to the door. My thought was "I'm not letting him through, he's dead!" and I was correct. This is the type of absurdist humor that could be expanded upon. Right now it's if you guess wrong, you die somehow. I'd like to see ways that you could fail and perhaps learn the rules...or maybe in the same fashion of "Papers, Please" you get sets of ever more complicated conflicting and contrasting rules. With some thought and expansion, this would be the kind of cute joke game people might really enjoy along the lines of "The Idiot Test" apps for phones.