Reviews by EJ

In Three Things, the player character is translating a poem for a college class on Russian-English translation while ruminating on their disintegrating relationship with their boyfriend.

The poem is by Anna Akhmatova, whose work I find fascinating because it's often laconic and ambiguous--clearly freighted with emotion, but what that emotion is can be hard to identify. The poem central to Three Things is no exception; it describes a man who's hard to please and especially disdainful of "hysterical" women, and concludes with the speaker's statement that she was his wife. Should we read pride into this last statement? Bitterness? Weary resignation? It's hard to say.

The translation aspect of the game is very much grounded in reality. This isn't Emily Short's Endure, where the possible "translations" you can select from are more loose interpretations of the overall situations in the poem. All of your options are plausible translations; the differences come down to nuance, the way the emphasis and tone can shift depending on the minutiae of word choice. As a sometime translator, I deeply appreciated this more realistic take on the process, because I think it can be a fascinating experience in and of itself; when you jazz it up to provide an artificially wide array of interpretations, that might make it more appealing to the layperson in some ways, but to me the art of translation exists primarily in navigating those tiny shades of meaning, and I'd love for more people to get to see how that works.

And of course, each possible word comes with associations for the PC, a different lens into their own failing relationship. Before making your choice, you can click on each option to see the PC's musings as prompted by that word; through these fragmentary but evocative lines, Three Things conveys the character of the PC's partner and the problems in their relationship. The PC is more of a cipher--but then, so is the speaker in the Akhmatova poem, so that's fitting. The sense of finality given to submitting your translation at the end of the game does suggest that perhaps, through this exercise, the PC has come to some conclusions about their relationship as well.

But while I appreciated many aspects of Three Things, the actual act of playing it was an exercise in frustration for me. I honestly do not understand why the game has the options come up on mouseover, instead of on click as is the usual way of things. I'll admit that this might be a me problem; I do have fine motor control issues, so I handle a mouse more clumsily than the average person. But the experience of playing through the game for me was one of accidentally mousing over a word I'd already selected a translation for, having the dialogue with the choices pop up, having to move my mouse to close the dialogue, then trying to move my mouse over to the next untranslated word, whereupon I would accidentally mouse over a word I'd already translated, and then...

Having the words that don't bring up a list of options be translated on mouseover is fine; I did keep getting them out of order due to the aforementioned clumsy mouse handling, but most people would probably find it clunkier to have that be on click. But I would dearly love for there to at least be a selectable setting to have the translation dialogue choices come up on click instead, because the interface as it is now made my time with Three Things much more frustrating than it had to be and distracted me from appreciating its artistry, which I very much wanted to do.

In Chinese Family Dinner Moment, the PC, a closeted AMAB trans person who has been away at college in the US, reunites with their Chinese Indonesian family for a Lunar New Year dinner. (Whether the character is a woman or nonbinary is not stated.) On one side is an auntie who wants to chatter inanely about family members the PC barely knows; on the other an uncle with unsavory intentions. The PC can't eat the food (they're a vegetarian), can't reveal too much about themself, can't stomach engaging with their family's conservative political opinions and general bigotry. In such a situation, what can you do? As anyone who's been through this kind of family dinner might guess, not much...

This is a very quick game, but it works perfectly at the length that it is, because it zooms in on this single moment and really makes the player feel the PC's acute discomfort and sense of being trapped, (Spoiler - click to show)as well as their self-disgust when they finally cave and starts parroting what their family wants to hear. Much of this is accomplished through the use of a strictly limited parser--a great illustration of how "interactivity" doesn't have to mean "making choices" or "solving puzzles." A static short story of a similar word count would not have nearly the impact that this has.

This short visual novel takes place in a dystopian future where an all-seeing AI, VIGIL, rules the earth. The AI's consciousness is distributed among multiple datacenters (or "nerve clusters") around the world, making it nigh-impossible to destroy it, or even strike a serious blow. If you can't hit all the nerve centers at once, its consciousness will remain mostly intact; it will regroup and rebuild, its dominance not seriously weakened.

The resistance movement, once large, is now down to three people. The PC and their two compatriots are locked in a bunker, dealing with all the interpersonal tensions and jealousies that are bound to come from being in close quarters with a small number of people for an extended time. But one point of conflict is of greater import to the world at large: They've gotten their hands on a weapon that can take out VIGIL, but the group's leader, Sleep, seems to have become oddly reluctant to use it. Why is she backing down now? And is she right to do so?

The Good Weapon's science-fictional concerns aren't new, but they're well-executed. In particular, the moody black-white-and-red art and the terse, sometimes fragmentary prose combine to create a palpably tense and oppressive atmosphere. It's not unremittingly grim, though; here and there, moments of hope and connection can be found--and these moments nag at the PC as they race towards their destructive goal, casting doubt on whether it's all worth it.

It's hard to talk about the way choices are used here without spoiling the game's central twist, but although I don't believe they lead to any branching, they do serve a narrative purpose and I found them effective. Another choice at the end might not have gone amiss, but I think the sparingly-used interactivity worked well as it was.

It's a shame that the game is download-only, since I know that a lack of browser playability puts people off, but if you don't mind that, I feel that this atmospheric and thoughtful little game is well worth your time.

June 1998, Sydney is a short narrative about a Chinese Indonesian woman living in Australia whose family moves in with her after anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia force them out of their home. Her white girlfriend then dumps her for being unwilling to come out to her family, hurling a racist insult as a parting remark.

Many people seem to have found it resonant and moving, so I'm a bit of an outlier here; my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But to me, the 500-word limit of the Twiny Jam did this narrative a disservice. You get very little background on the main character, her relationship with her family, or her relationship with her girlfriend; the player is more or less launched straight into a conversation with the girlfriend that escalates from "hello" to total bridge-burning in the space of three or four exchanges. (I also couldn't really tell where on the scale of "blindsided" to "long aware that something like this was coming" the PC was in all this.) Then there's a brief scene with the family watching television coverage of the riots; then it's over.

I can feel bad for the character in the abstract; it is clear that she's dealing with a lot. I can fill in some of the emotional blanks from personal or secondhand experience (and others would be able to fill in even more). But to me, this 500-word vignette doesn't paint a clear picture of a person or a situation or a particular tangle of emotions; it's just a series of events moved through so briskly and with so little detail that it's hard to really feel the emotional punch.