Reviews by Wynter

The protagonist has fought angels and been injured in a war against them, and is now recovering in a monastery without a face, in order to not be seen by the angels. A lot about the angels and the monastery isn't filled in, and I'd like to know more, but the real story is about something else: the protagonist goes on a journey through a sometimes disturbing landscape, and is haunted by dreams of terrible things that happened in the past.

This is an effective use of Twine link text to draw out the story slowly - sometimes the player needs to go back, wait, or click on a number of options before moving forward. There's some atmospheric sound effects, too - wind chimes in the monastery, crickets at night - and I would have liked more of these throughout the game.

This was great. A believable situation (a character desperate to earn a bit of extra money) in a future which may not be too far away: one where most jobs are done by robots, and most people are living precariously. Images of people on a website are computer-generated rather than real; people have temporary tattoos to confuse facial recognition software. There are several nice little observations on life in this world:

It’s pointless, making the effort to write your name neatly and with flair when you’re writing with your finger on a touch-pad, but you do it every time. Maybe people need small, pointless things to feel proud of.

There are two main areas of choice for the reader: a choice of three different reasons why you want to earn extra money (a dog requiring medical care; a bad living situation; a hobby), and the different choices for how you act, leading to one of a few different endings. The former of the two (Spoiler - click to show)doesn’t exactly change the outcome, but it’s a nice touch: your decisions make the game is more interesting upon replay, and it affects the strange dreams that you have when you are under the influence of the test drug. These are some of the most sinister passages in the game, and it’s worth playing all three versions (dog/roommates/hobby) to get the full effect.

One day, completely out of the blue, you get a phone call from Rachel Kessler, the sister of your old university room-mate, Martin. He's gone missing, and she needs someone to find him. Preferably someone weird, which is why she called you. Because Martin and his family are very unusual people - inventors, scientists and dreamers - and it takes an unusual person to get inside his mind, and find out where he has gone. On your journey, you travel to the other side of the world, to outer space, to the past, and to the future, aided by hints from the myriad pop culture references that Wennstrom has scattered throughout her game.

What attracts me to big games like this is not only brainteasing, satisfying puzzles, but also a meaningful, complex storyline. Finding Martin has both - but this is a hard act to pull off. Most people's lives do not involve solving puzzles in order to do basic things. So in order to make the story convincing, you have to be able to justify why these obstacles exist in the context of the story and its characters, rather than just for the sake of having puzzles for the player to solve. In the case of Finding Martin, the puzzles are justified by the fact that Martin and his father are eccentric inventors, people who, instead of having a door like normal people, would open a room using (Spoiler - click to show)a bust of Beethoven with responsive features. More and more of the house, and the map in general, opens up as you figure out how the Kessler family home works.

In the earlier part of the game, we only once or twice get a hint of how the player character feels about Martin - his work identity card doesn't really look like the happy young man you remember, and the closet is as messy as you'd expect. It would be good to have some flashbacks which shed light on your own relationship with him. But as the game develops, some very long narrative portions start to put together who Martin is, and who his friends and family members are. There is a long backstory about Martin's childhood, the death of his father, and what exactly he was working on; and as you progress, not only do you learn parts of this story and about the relationships between the characters, you also get to involve yourself in them as well. The scene in the (Spoiler - click to show)Sweet transformation is particularly well-written, as you can move to different parts of the scene and watch different groups of characters interact.

This is a nicely non-linear game. The map becomes increasingly larger as you go on, and there are often several lines of enquiry open to you at once. This means that you have more than one thing to work on when you get stuck, although sometimes it's not apparent which are dead ends and which puzzles can be solved right now. There are a few hint systems, and the narrative voice sometimes spells things out that would not otherwise be obvious, such as suggesting that (Spoiler - click to show)a pocket watch belongs in a pocket. I would have been lost without the walkthrough, but the game was engaging enough for me to keep persevering with it, and it was always a great pleasure when I managed to solve a difficult puzzle by myself.

Overall, Finding Martin is staggeringly well-implemented, nearly every part working perfectly like clockwork. The (Spoiler - click to show)time travel trips, particular the Sour transformations, work particularly beautifully, although I never really got the hang of (Spoiler - click to show)the fuzzy cube, which not only seemed to have entirely arbitrary workings, but sometimes wouldn't behave the same way twice even under identical circumstances, and (Spoiler - click to show)the dream at the very end, where I found myself needing to go back to an earlier save file because for some reason the correct actions didn't work.

How do you approach this game? With patience, a sense of humour, and a willingness to try things. Start off by examining, looking in, looking under, and looking behind everything you can see. Once you've found the (Spoiler - click to show)watch and have figured out what it can do, it's worth taking some time to explore every single possible setting and copy and paste into a document every response that you get from it. Yes, that will take a long time. You're in this for the long haul, but the early work will pay off. Much of what you discover will be a hint for solving a puzzle, whether immediately or later on. And enjoy the ride. Take some time to read those long cut-scenes (and, again, save copies), get to know the various characters, keep your eyes open for clues, and start piecing together the story. Because that's when the game becomes something more than just a series of amusing puzzles to be solved, but instead the story of a young man suffering the loss of an eccentric but beloved father.

This falls into the genre of slice-of-life relationship-based stories, centring on a disagreement between a couple and how it ties into the hidden faultlines of their relationship: the title is elegantly apt. The story is told from different viewpoints, often flitting back and forth, which I wasn’t initially expecting, but it’s done very well. I wasn’t sure what the setting is supposed to be - one of the characters is supposed to have worked as a messenger, delivering messages across the city, but that’s the only real indicator: the story centres on a situation that could happen in all sorts of worlds.

A very nice-looking Twine, and rather like a short story in its ability to communicate a lot in what only takes a brief time to play. I very much liked the use of differently-coloured links for different purposes - blue to add extra description, red to move the story onwards. At the end, you reach a page listing all the endings you have reached so far, so it has some good replay value.

Four girls are playing a kind of Bloody Mary-style psychological/supernatural game, in which one of them enters another world: just how real is this going to get?

A very interesting innovation is that it is not the ‘you’ character who actually performs the action. You are Emily, and you put your sister Claire ‘under’; she tells you what she is seeing and interacting with in this other world, and you tell her what to do, although Claire doesn't always go willingly with your suggestions. Meanwhile, your two friends occasionally chip in with their thoughts, or laugh at something on their phones. I found the frame setting and narration completely believable, fresh, and appealing, and loved the kind of split viewpoint. It even has a cat in it.

The map is pretty large for a short game, and most locations are not described in the thorough, languid detail that I tend to value in parser games. But that’s absolutely right for this game: Claire is feeding back descriptions to her friends, and is more interested in the basic details - where she can go, what she can pick up - than in giving emotional descriptions of places. But this game can go from innocent fun to real horror very unexpectedly.

A short/medium-length Twine narrative about being pushed into an early marriage with the child of a strange, wealthy couple, and going to live with your new spouse on an unnerving island, unable to leave. It reminded me a little of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, even though the narrator of that novel gets married willingly: it had the same sense of not being wanted and not being able to escape.

The game does a great job of creating a Gothic atmosphere, with a protagonist who feels distinctly out of place and in the dark about what is going on. I say ‘in the dark’ but the palette of this story is one of light and brightness, and the haunting emptiness of those, rather than the shadows and night-time that I would expect of a Gothic tale, and Lassiter pulls this off well. At the very beginning, you are prompted to provide your own name, and it is suggested that the name is something to do with paleness; later on, a character remarks that the colour white, rather than having connotations of purity and goodness, feels empty and hostile.

The choice-based aspect of the game allows you to choose the gender of the three protagonists - I played twice, and experimented with these - and also, wisely for a game that turns on the main character’s powerlessness, the extent to which you decide to cooperate with those around you.

The overall look of the Twine interface was very nice, and the writing was good.

This is a solid branching-narrative Twine story which begins with trying (and mostly failing) to get to sleep at night. It’s got a kind of immediacy to it, and it’s easy to get hooked into the stories. A good innovation, for a game with “more than 25 endings” is that, when you’ve reached a few endings, it makes it easier to navigate them. For example, the game opens up a list of the endings found so far, and (later on) gives you the option to restart from the last significant branch-point, two design points which should be widely used amongst games of this kind.

The branching paths do sometimes meet, but mostly it’s a story that leads out into all kinds of different directions(Spoiler - click to show) - you get caught up in shady dealings at work, or end up in a monastery, for instance - that are unexpected and make it a good, unpredictable read.

I'd seen Clickventures referred to on the IFDB but not actually encountered one until now.

This is a whimsical short game about trying to evolve into a duck. I'm no scientist but I'm fairly sure that some of the evolutionary pathways described are slightly less than accurate, which is part of the extremely silly fun of it. I also enjoyed the fact that there is a side branch of the story where you can spend several turns as a (Spoiler - click to show)capybara, a creature which I am quite fond of, although that story doesn't end well.

After numerous playthroughs, and a rough idea of which pathways were dead ends, I (Spoiler - click to show)eventually managed to evolve into a duck via the most unlikely route possible.

This is one of the most polished, multimedia-confident Twines I have ever come across. Some great graphics, particularly at the end, and a really good, atmospheric soundtrack.

Writing a puzzle game in Twine is potentially a challenge because the options are laid out for the reader already, but a way around that is to have lots of options so that the signal is hidden amongst the noise. I took a few tries on this one, and found a way of exploring every location before making any irreversible errors. Part of me wanted a bit more detail about the world which the PC is living in, the mission, and what has happened - but perhaps it was all the more evocative that these things are only briefly sketched in. It took me several plays before I managed to get to the good ending, and held my attention through all of them. A very accomplished game.

The title (from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) almost makes it sound like this game is going to be amusing, except it's anything but.

You are lost at sea, alone, and have a number of choices to help you get out of your predicament. Consume your supplies, or save them for later? Save your strength, or row - and in which direction? Try fishing?

But all this is just a distraction from what is really going on. There's a tale waiting to be told, and you'd prefer not to tell it ...

A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things has a solid enough story, and makes worthwhile enough use of a choice-based interface, to be a decent read in its own right. But what raises this game to being something truly special is the use of simple graphics (well, one particular graphic: you won't have to play for too long before you'll know the one I mean), and, above all, the music, composed and arranged by the author, which is by turns awe-inspiring, evocative, and sinister.

I've played three times and I think have only reached two distinct endings, but I believe there to be at least four. It'd be nice to know how many there are, because this is definitely worth a few replays to appreciate in full.