Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

[Time to completion: 10-15 minutes]

You're Amity, and you're out in the park to meet Li Anderson, your girlfriend, when somebody starts yelling for help. This starts as a cozy story about two girls, but abruptly turns into a story about fighting monsters.

The writing in the beginning is not as inspired, not as sharp as one might expect. There's some self-examination along the lines of "This is my average high school life", which is not entirely unwarranted. The conversation between the PC and Li touches on deeper issues, such as how sexuality is portrayed in media.

The later part moves faster, but I sensed that it was trying to hint at something greater through elements from mythology and metaphor and cultural references - as far as I could tell, anyway. It felt incongruous - perhaps because there was too little space, narrative-wise, to lead up to this.

I had strong vibes of Birdland and Astrid Dalmady's Yesterday, You Saved the World in this game, but the emotional impact didn't quite hit it for me. Birdland did it by establishing Bridget's and Bell's character and weaknesses earlier on, making their eventual triumph more satisfying. Here, there's a lot less tension from the start, which loosens the driving force for the resolution.

Some interesting elements in this one, and this game seems to have angled at invoking fuzzy good feelings, so it's probably good for a short diversion.

[Time to completion: 5-10 minutes]

Here, you are a husband to a grieving wife, and you have the curious power to rewind time. Each time you do this, it comes with a physical toll. Ever since the accident shattered your small family, you've been making more and more use of this skill.

This game is not always polished - in some places, the prose would have benefited from a rigorous editing. What this game does well, though, is give a sense of weariness as the narrator deals with what is now nothing more than routine - emotionally taxing and unusual it may be, but routine.

The in-game action of rewinding essentially gives a reason for undoing, but makes the reader think hard about the act. Do you want to risk hurting an already-unwell wife, or do you want to spare yourself an act you have been performing thousands of times? There are no happy endings in this game. It is not lighthearted playing.

The stage is prepared. The house is open. Now, you wait.

The author captures the inner landscapes of performance well here. There's the restlessness before the curtain rises. Reflecting this, there's a small number of things you can do in this game, which is randomised in parts. There aren't any obvious goals. You can do things for NPCs - tiny quests, if you will. Regardless of what you do, the curtains will eventually rise, and you will assume your role.

Another aspect of performance: the bleeding over of on-stage roles into how you see the actors themselves. NPCs are referred to by their roles - Chatillon, 1st Executioner - even before they get on stage.

I was attracted to this because I've had my share of performances, with very similar feelings. If you've ever been part of any kind of performance, you'll probably enjoy it.

[Time to completion: 5-10 minutes]

In this game, you are at the beach with your boyfriend, medicinal weed brownies and a lump in your breast. This game is not about the lump, not mainly. This game is about confronting your own mortality and anxieties.

The Ocean is surprisingly similar to Tapes: both have a female protagonist who has some kind of physical ailment; both are in a relationship with a man, but most of all both share the same introspective, melancholic mood.

The Ocean uses a stream-of-consciousness style, coloured with metaphors, to explore the protagonist's emotions. The tone is distant, as if recalling a long-ago event, but unexpectedly snarky in places. The reader, here, is the narrator's confidante and companion. The reader's role, here, is not to perform or do or solve problems: it is to listen. And in the act of listening - of clicking through the words and reading it - the narrator comes to a kind of peace.

[This game features graphic descriptions of violence. Please exercise discretion.]

A short horror IF about something you found in the woods. There is a body. There is blood.

This game uses a branch-and-bottleneck structure, lending it some of the dread-inducing momentum as False Mavis had. The descriptions are visceral; the pace, inexorable. Instead of focusing on verbs - how you interact with your environment - the game instead focuses on nouns - what you interact with, as alluded to in the title. This gave me a sense of the PC focusing on the trivial, filling their senses with the minutiae of one thing, to block out the horror of the whole. Perhaps making the protagonist a child enhanced this: for how can a child make sense of all this?

The ending is ambiguous and addresses the story indirectly, so one might fill the blanks with one's own imagination. wood leaves stream body blood is a bleak and desolate short story, well worth the 10 minutes it took to play.

This entry in Twiny Jam uses the 300 word limit and a endlessly looping structure (similar to It is Not So Much a Story) to create a landscape. It's remarkably evocative, and in terms of content, it's similar in spirit to vale of singing metals.

Singular is well-conceptualised and, like The Tiniest Room, makes full use of the 300 word limit. For its size, there is progress, of a sort. There is a world to explore in little chunks. Take a little more time than you might and you might discover something unexpected.