Reviews by MostImmortalSnail

The previous games I went through for the Great Play Marathon were about an hour each, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this one took me less than twelve minutes to finish. Despite that, I enjoyed it much more than the other, longer games.

The setting is surreal and whimsical, the story tightly crafted. No words are wasted. Everything hints at larger things going on behind the scenes, which you the reader hardly can comprehend because you are really just a guest in this strange place, helping the protagonist go about their daily business. I admire games written in this style. Several times I was reminded of S. Woodson's Beautiful Dreamer and Magical Makeover. There's a similar flair to Magical Makeover here; both games feature a dreamy European-esque environment with masks, revelry and elaborate costumes, though here it has a darker edge. Perhaps Summit or Porpentine's games, like Their Angelical Understanding, would also be a good comparison.

Shufflecomp games are all inspired by songs. I didn't listen to "Tragic Kingdom", so can't comment on it, but "Paper Planes" has an interesting story. In 2015, when this game was made, M.I.A was mainly known as a countercultural singer who advocated for refugees. "Paper Planes" itself was commonly seen as a pro-refugee song where she satirizes the perception of refugees and the poor as violent criminals. But she's since come out as a Trump-supporting antivaxxer and born-again Christian, losing many of her former fans. When I heard "Paper Planes" for the first time a few years ago, her new reputation was well-established, so it was an odd experience.

In general, while some details from the songs are used in To Spring Open, it mostly does its own thing. But like "Paper Planes", the game has undeniable overtones of class and political exploitation.

The whole story has the player at one remove: you're helping the protagonist act upon the world, but are unable to fully inhabit it due to unfamiliarity with the setting. Yet the protagonist, too, is removed from the world because they're only a messenger or envoy, acting at the behest of a party we don't fully understand. (Spoiler - click to show)Given the painful shock the protagonist receives every time they receive a new duty, I wonder if even the rebellions they participate in aren't something they fully chose. It could all be another shackle.

Somehow, I like this. It contributes to the fantastical nature of the piece to have ambiguity about who the protagonist is serving and why, and whether they really chose this life. And it feels appropriate that in this game's very short runtime, the story doesn't clog itself up trying to explain away every detail. It starts in media res, and ends that way. Though I haven't watched Spirited Away or much Studio Ghibli at all, other reviewers have brought them up, and the game really does have the feeling of the surreal, fantastical animations that come out of animation centers like Goebelins.

A few more concluding notes:

• The story mainly uses the default Sugarcube styling, but adds in some minimalist CSS effects to represent different in-game locations, including a wonderful animation that plays when on the subway. They accentuate the story without distracting from it.

• There are no true "puzzles" besides the task of figuring out where to go and what to do next, something I had no issues with.

• Haven't been able to figure out the meaning of the title. Wondering if I've missed something, or if the creators wanted to be coy. It could have symbolic meaning, but I don't know what exactly.

I played this right after The Axolotl Project as part of OtisTDog's event: The Great Play Marathon. This made it hard not to compare Ravine to The Axolotl Project, but for the sake of people who haven't played both, I won't fill this review with comparisons. Suffice to say that I liked Ravine a lot more, though there are still some things about it that bothered me.

Ravine is good at creating a tense atmosphere in few words. The writing is competent. It succinctly describes an intriguing setting, mystery, and main character within the first few minutes. You're thrown into the thick of it right from the jump, and you're never sure what will happen next. I liked the beginning for how bizarre it was, for all the strange clues being tossed the player's way that just beg you to ask, "How will all of this come together? How will it resolve?" I was invested.

The part of Ravine I disliked is everything after the big reveal. Ravine is a horror story that hinges on suspense, and I think it plays its hand too early. After you find out what's going on, the rest of the game is an essentially linear path to defeating the villain and winning. No more mystery. No more wondering what happens next. After everything was explained, I was no longer invested the way I was at the start.

I don't mind linear games, necessarily, but I think Ravine combines the worst of both worlds. It's not exactly linear because you can make choices that lead to a bad ending, but it's extremely obvious that they're bad choices, so it's extremely easy to avoid them. Since you can never lose except by making those obvious bad decisions, it's extremely easy to win. You also never get to explore the results of the bad decisions, because they instantly take you to a bad end screen and you don't get to see the full-fledged consequences of your actions.

In the end, it feels like nothing really has consequences. I replayed the game, and none of the choices you make in the first half of the game really matter, since the story goes the same way no matter what. You can be nice or be a total asshole, and it hardly makes a difference. Even things that I thought might matter, like whether you take certain items or not, don't play a huge role in the ending.

Mild ending spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)The player's victory comes down to something from the protagonist's backstory, which is completely out of your control. There is foreshadowing for this, but I found it dissatisfying that all you do to win is just click the obviously correct links and watch the protagonist come up with the right solution. It felt unearned. It was a big "That's it?" moment for me.

On top of that, you have the actual contents of the backstory to consider.

Major spoilers for the entire story and ending:

You can come up with logical objections to all my points above. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)on the last point: the protagonist is clearly approaching this question from the perspective of her own personal trauma and not the dispassionate view of a scientist or historian, so maybe it shouldn't apply. On the second-to-last point: people have different psychologies, so the question could just be how the protagonist thinks about her own personal trauma. I know different people will have different reactions to the ending and my opinion of it. But this is just how I felt.

One final factor: I've always liked ambiguous, mysterious stories that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Stories that leave their readers guessing. Think Cannery Vale. Ravine doesn't really do this, despite the promising intro. By the end of the story, we know exactly what caused all the problems and how to deal with it. Maybe my real issue with Ravine is that it just isn't subtle enough.

I wasn't really fond of this game. I wanted to be, because it has generally positive reviews, but I was underwhelmed by the story and gameplay.

It's a testament to how far Twine has come, I think. Perhaps when this game first came out it would have been an impressive demonstration of what Twine is capable of, but nowadays we have Twine games like A Long Way to a Nearest Star or Trigaea which easily top it.

As for The Axolotl Project, contrary to a lot of the other positive reviews, I found the story to be simplistic and the characters to be mostly one or two-note. The plot holes and general inconsistencies in the writing are what bother me the most. The dialogue often just doesn't make sense with the situation the protagonist is supposed to be in. For instance, you can talk to Donovan and ask him basic questions about his research even though you've already been an intern for at least three months and should really know the answers to what you're asking. You can ask him basic questions about other people that you really should know the answers to, because they've definitely been around long enough that you should have met them already. But Donovan doesn't even question it. This really annoyed me; it's the type of scene where two characters have a conversation about basic information they should already know just to provide exposition to the audience. That, or the story's timelines are inconsistent, or both.

This happens very frequently. With almost any character you talk to, you can ask questions you should know the answers to and they'll answer without batting an eye. And despite the fact that the protagonist is an intern at the research station, it's never clear exactly what your intern duties actually are (the whole story takes place while you're not working), what project(s) you've been assigned to work on, or what an actual work day would look like for you. Henry, who you report to, has been gone for about three months, but who's replaced him? It can't be Gallo, right? The start basically says that the protagonist has been doing nothing for the three whole months after Henry leaves. There's also a big lack of scientists considering that the research station belongs to one of the most exclusive companies in the world, and I assume it's not easy to get a position in a moon base. Of the two scientists who work with you, one hardly does anything and the other is gone, with an empty lab behind him. Where are the other scientists? Assistant researchers? In fact, why is it even possible for you to be an intern on the moon base in the first place if they only have room for a few scientists, since I assume they'd want their most experienced employees who have years of tenure in there and not just someone who's presumably a college student and will go back to school after the summer's over? Especially because the moon base is where they produce their most important research on their most profitable and secretive product? The game mentions that the moon base is being expanded, but we never talk to any other scientists or researchers.

Questions like these aren't really touched on, and despite looking at all the items and backstory notes, I didn't feel like I had a good picture of what it would actually be like to work in the moon base, even though it's a huge part of the protagonist's situation. And I get that some of the quibbles I had, like the small number of scientist characters you can actually talk to, comes from game design constraints, but the fact that it's not really addressed or even lampshaded makes it hard to keep suspending disbelief.

It doesn't help that the dialogue paths are coded so that you can go back to the start of a conversation and go down a different dialogue path with no consequences, leading to the impression that the protagonist can either turn back time at will to have the same conversation over and over again as they wish or every character has some serious problems with short-term memory loss. Alright, that's a little mean considering that dialogue is hard to get right, conventions like this are common in Twine games, and I doubt the author wanted to implement stuff like remembering topics. But even something like preventing an already-discussed topic from being discussed again, or preventing the same conversation from being had twice, would go a long way.

As for the overall plot, it reminds me of a YA story. The protagonist is a young plucky do-gooder facing off against a bunch of older people who don't seem to notice or care about the great evil going on, she gets the inexplicable chance to solve everything herself (because the other people in this world have apparently been doing nothing in the three months since Henry left, and their evil plans just so happen to launch off on the exact same day that the protagonist discovers and is then put in a position to stop them), and she does so.

It's troperific. You discover clues to what's been going on via Slenderman-style exposition notes, for example. There's evil dramatic villain speeches and stuff, all very Saturday morning breakfast cereal cartoony.

Basically all the character backstories are explained via direct exposition, and you can describe the entire personality and life story of every character in a short sentence. (Spoiler - click to show)Donovan is the alcoholic scientist with a dead family, the protagonist is the plucky do-gooder intern, Gallo is the evil power-hungry scientist who steals other people's work, and so on. I liked Crystal more than the others, but even the opening conversation with her is extremely unsubtle: (Spoiler - click to show)almost no matter what you do, it ends with The Art of War being shoehorned in there as obvious foreshadowing that Crystal is planning something. And while having two personalities over one is an upgrade, I still wish she was more well-rounded, just like everyone else. We never really learn much about her past, her family background or what motivates her to act the way she does. What does she think about the ethics of working for the company? How does she justify it to herself? Is she actually religious or just pretending to be? We don't know.

The story felt too black-and-white to me, and moreover just too easily resolved. The ending has you (Spoiler - click to show)blackmail a CEO by threatening to reveal that his company would have delivered a medication that killed humans en masse, and has also been enslaving and torturing a population of innocent aliens on the Moon. The threat of the PR storm is enough to actually scare him, and later you can go free all the slaves by pressing a single emergency release button. Maybe current events have just made me a cynic, but I think that if it was revealed a huge corporation was enslaving and torturing a population of innocents, or planning to deliver a product that would have killed countless people, the corporation would suffer next to no consequences. People would acknowledge that it's terrible but they can't do anything about it, and most of them would move on while the CEO gets richer and richer off the blood of the exploited. The same thing has happened and is happening many times over in the real world, where Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire a few days ago.