Ratings and Reviews by CMG

Maybe you've been buried dead. Maybe not. Maybe you're not entirely alive or dead. Whatever you are, though, you are aware, and this is a short Twine game about how time passes for you underground.

It’s more prose-poetry than prose. More about the experience than the story, although there is a story that unfolds through memories you turn over in your head as you rot. Memories about a death cult, about your family history, about trees sprung from unusual soil. Piecing this together isn’t as important as simply letting these narrative details eat at you like worms while the days, months, and years pass. Death here isn’t an ending and it’s not a beginning. It’s a state to consider.

This game could have used its fictional setting as an invitation to create some very strange mythology, but it actually doesn’t wander too far, almost like it’s a shadow just one or two steps removed from the real world. It’s got restraint.

At Anchor is micro fiction. No more than a few hundred words. But it expands beyond those words, beyond the game. Into Epictetus’s Enchiridion and Caelyn Sandel’s Tiny Beach. You have to reach outside to understand what’s anchored to the text.

The game’s soundscape and seascape might seem to offer an escape. Only briefly. You are combing a beach but you will return to your ship one way or another. Still, you have a moment’s meditation. With just three actions, the game opens diverse options: listen for the captain’s call, never listen and search the sand instead, listen but then ignore the call, listen and then obey.

These seem small choices. They are as large as you want them to be. Their largeness lies between their lines. When, at one end, certain sentences repeat with more words missing each time, the blank space following the final line may say as much as the now-missing language.

Interactive fiction this economic cannot simply be swallowed. It will go down too fast. You have to wander with it, let your thoughts circle, allow the game to pull them back to its center. Then maybe let them leave the game entirely.