Ratings and Reviews by Cerfeuil

I know there's a lot of grad school lit theory about the significance of words and images and signifiers and stuff, but I have no direct experience with that so I can only vaguely gesture at it from afar. Sad. But it's the first thing I thought of with this game.

The concept is pretty unique: it's a Twine game made by a sentient word that's taken over your body, written to you, the player. And word means word, as in a series of letters (or strokes, characters, etc? but this is in English so I'm assuming letters) representing an idea. We never find out what idea or what word the narrator actually is, so there's a layer of abstraction there. You could say the narrator is more the concept of a word than an actual word, I mean, obviously real words can't write Twine games and take over people's bodies and so on. But that's basic suspension of disbelief, so anyway.

A lot of the story is musing on meaning and the difference between words and images, the significance of both in interactive fiction, and stuff like that. There's some fun references to typography ("...I felt like serifs were coming out of me -- it's sweat. Sweating is a terrifying experience"), and emphasis placed on how limited and inadequate words are for communication, compared to actually living life and experiencing things directly. The word suffers from a bit of sensory overload over all the possibilities available to a human body and wonders how writers can just gloss over details like the glow of a lightbulb ("I can't believe writers don't talk about these magical devices forever"). Which is ironic, of course, because the game itself is entirely text with no images or extra stylings or anything of the sort. It was made for the Bare-Bones Jam, where the lack of extra formatting was a requirement. Pretty good use of the limitation, I think.

The in-story explanation for why the styling is so bare-bones is that the word didn't have time to learn about styling Twine. There's some nice details that come from the word being very honest about its newbie status, like the desk passage it just forgot to write about: "Oh shoot, I was so busy writing the game that I forgot to set up this node until I started to test it..." or the remark about how it'd be nicer if the Harlowe documentation was easier to read. The word's personality comes through pretty strong in this story, despite its relatively short wordcount. Our narrator is humble, awed at the richness of human existence, and endearing in an "aw shucks" way. I liked it.

The word expresses a strong belief in the superiority of images over text, and says an ideal world would contain no text, only images. Even the law would be expressed in images only. It's clearly a comedic kind of opinion you're meant to disagree with, and there's an especially funny part where the word discovers something called the "Top 50 Interactive Fiction" list and gets ticked off that all these games have so many words in them. "Unbelievable!"

But in the end there's still an acknowledgement that words are communiciation, and like any form of communication they can reach someone and affect them deeply. Sure, there are things you can do with images and multimedia that words could never manage, but the converse is also true. It's why we're here.

Some other stuff:

1 - The "you" in the story, i.e. the human whose body gets taken over, isn't a generic AFGNCAAP protagonist but a specific person with their own hobbies and so on. The bookshelf specifically made me wonder if the human is based on the author specifically, since it has the kind of books I feel like they'd own. You can look through each one and get commentary: there's manga, an international relations textbook, and also Pale Fire is in there. Which is really funny. Like finding a metafictional cherry hidden in your metafictional cake.

2 - I appreciate that we get to try out dozens of clothes articles from the dresser. Each one has detailed descriptions of how the word reacts, too. Pretty fun.

I would probably have more to say on this matter if I'd read all that stuff about signifiers. Unfortunately, I haven't.

Playtime: ~10 min

I played this game a while ago and figured I might as well write something for the review-a-thon event. For me it's hard to really rate and review most Neo Twiny games, since they have a 500 word limit, so usually you can't say too much on the game itself without going into tangents and eventually rambling on for paragraphs about nothing relevant in particular. I might do some of that.

I liked this game. Somewhere the author said they liked Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, a book I also really like, and I found myself thinking about Annihilation while playing. Mostly for the flavor of eldritch horror. In Annihilation, a team of scientists travel into a wilderness overtaken by an eldritch force, lush with strange and winderful lifeforms; here, the entity that accosts the protagonist's spacecraft is described as "beautiful and terrible and surreal". The key is that in both stories, the horror isn't horrific at all but more something unknown, difficult to understand, totally outside the landscape of human knowledge. To understand it would be to cease being human. That kind of deal.

But there seems to be no actual malice on the entity's part. It doesn't rip people apart or anything. Of the deaths it causes in this story, two are from suicide and two are from crew members fighting over whether they should let it in. (Spoiler - click to show)This is actually what you do in one of the game's three endings: you open the door to let that thing in, whatever it is, and the story ends with the understanding that the protagonist will never see Earth again.

There are two other endings, but that last one is my favorite. I guess it's a flavor of story I like. It's the whole leap of faith thing, accepting the unknown. To me, the story is about acceptance. The beauty of reaching out to the thing that's destroyed you, because you need to understand. Alien connection. Humanity's ultimate insignificance in the universe. Ascension in a way that involves losing everything, but you do it because you're compelled to make contact with a higher form of existence. Or something like that. I could go on.

I don't know how much of that is implicit in the game and how much is just me reading stuff I like into what's a pretty short story, all things considered. In Annihilation, people don't really die. They're transformed. It could be the same here, too, or maybe the ending where you let it in just ends with an unceremonious death for the protagonist as she's instantly killed. Hard to say. But anyway, cool stuff.

I also have to mention the great CSS. Minimalistic but hits all the right notes.

Playtime: ~5 min