Reviews by Wynter

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.

A text adventure with a twist: without giving too much away, the player has much more freedom to imagine what can be done with the objects they find than in the average parser game.

Metamorphoses takes place in a fascinating and mysterious setting, a medieval/early modern world of alchemy and of the four humours. You are in a house filled with strange and wonderful objects and paintings, which enhance the gameplay considerably. I would have liked to have known more about the building you are in, and how it came to be as it is, and more backstory about the playing character and the Master more generally. In Emily Short's Bronze, for comparison, the castle and the objects within it are more closely linked to the story.

It is a short game, and according to the 'help' function, not a difficult one; I actually found it harder than I expected, perhaps because the setting is so mysterious that the actions you have to perform are not always self-explanatory, and also there is the extra challenge provided by the sheer number of permutations that the game allows.

I admired this game mostly for the clever idea and for the gorgeous descriptions and setting that I have come to expect from an Emily Short game.

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.

NOTE: as explained below, I think there are a couple of bugs in the "play online" versions: read on if you are stuck.

I'd been looking for a new, medium/large puzzle game to play, but I often find parsers difficult and slow to get off the ground, and tend to give up on them very quickly. First Things First finally broke this streak.

You are off to return your time travel books to the library when you discover that you've locked yourself out of the house. Quite coincidentally, an actual time machine materialises in your neighbourhood (you accept this in a somewhat matter-of-fact way), allowing you to visit a further four time periods, starting from before the house was built, and ending in an apparently dystopian future.

The puzzles are pitched at just the right level: difficult enough to get me thinking, but not so hard that I gave up. Notably, they are often of the kind where, just when you think you have solved the problem, another barrier turns out to be in the way, and what was apparently a simple goal gets further and further away: truly infuriating and deeply satisfying. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, you try to plant a tree. One bottle of Miracle-Grow is not enough to get it to grow large enough, so you need to figure out a way of taking all the bottles. When that's done, it turns out still not to be enough, so another bottle has to be acquired. The tree allows you to get into an otherwise unreachable part of the map to pick up an object which you had been looking for, but the next problem is getting out, and so on. Some puzzles have more than one solution.

The game was written with real attention to detail: it's a joy to see how the descriptions of different parts of the map change as you alter the past and the future. The tone shifts a great deal, encompassing tranquillity (the woodlands that were there before the house was built), urgency (long passages of dialogue with a major character at a crucial part in the game) and occasionally terror(Spoiler - click to show): there is one surprisingly unnerving sequence, which some players might miss, where you grow the tree to its full extent and fix the roof but do not install a lightning conductor, and then go into the +10-year future and attempt to climb the tree. The game goes to considerable lengths to instil a sense of growing panic as you lose your grip, and fall to the ground, leaving you alive but unable to move. Playing with (Spoiler - click to show)the bank while having time travel abilities is also great fun.

However, I ran into a wall at an important point in the story: in the section called "Outside the Executive VP's Office", the game froze: in the middle of a block of text, there should have been a "press any key" option and there wasn't! I was using the Parchment interpreter on iplayif.com (the "Play Online" option above) - there seems to be something wrong with it. So I restarted using the elseif player ("Play Online in Browser"), which has a separate window for typing in commands, and that did the trick.

Unusually for me, I didn't need to resort to a walkthrough: the in-game hints were enough. However, I ended up consulting it because, close to the end, I got stuck in a loop which may be a bug because it doesn't make sense as a deliberate way to get the player stuck. (Spoiler - click to show)If you just walk into the museum, the young man will offer you a tour, but there is no way of accepting it: typing "yes" or "follow young man" just lead him to repeat his offer; you can't even move beyond this point. I checked the walkthrough and discovered that there is a note underneath the doormat, instructing you to knock on the door. If you do so, you can type "yes" in response to the man's questions, and "follow young man" should work also.

It looks as if First Things First has been relatively underappreciated in the twenty years since it came out, and undeservedly so. If you're looking for a well-thought-out puzzle game that will neither be a pushover nor impossibly taxing, this could be the one.

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.

I had long marked Bee for reading one day, but was disappointed to see that it was no longer available as the original platform was now defunct; thanks to the efforts of the author and of Autumn Chen, this sweet story is now getting the readers it so well deserves once more.

The unnamed narrator, perhaps 11 or 12 years old, is educated at home with her younger sister. Her life is shaped by the seasons of the church, the homespun ways of her frugal parents, the trends of her local home education circle, and a long-running desire to win a national spelling competition.

Each 'turn' in the story gives the reader a set of options, which recur throughout: the chance to review some spellings; a social engagement; household chores; services for different times of the Christian year. Within the chosen passage, more options nudge the narrator towards different actions, subtly shifting the story in one direction or another.
Gradually, four different endings emerge. As with any choice-based fiction that commands my attention, I was pleased to read this one over and over, each time uncovering a few different passages, and moving the story in a different direction.

The subtlety of the story comes from the fact that the narrator's family are presented as trying to be distinctly different from the world around them while also avoiding real fanaticism. The narrator sometimes wishes to please her parents, while also displaying a streak of sarcasm from time to time. Above all, she begins to get a sense of how her life could unfold after the competition and once she has a chance to live differently one day.

A really lovely story, and worth the wait.

I've often wondered what it would be like to write a full-length novel in Twine which branched off in all kinds of different directions, with a really long reading time, so you could end up reading several completely different novels depending on which path you took. Or simply a vast fantasy world, which you could explore at your leisure, finding more and more places to discover and be delighted by.

I mention this because The Hole Man goes some way towards achieving both of these objectives. You start out preparing for jury duty, and have your identity - your whole self - stolen from you, and end up in a kind of surreal world. There is a whole world in this game to explore, and though the different branches often overlap, the game area is big enough that there were always new things to discover. You drift from one setting to another, whether realistic or pleasantly surreal, almost without noticing, just as if you were in a dream. It's funny in places (Spoiler - click to show)(such as, when asked for your favourite genre of writing is, and you say 'interactive fiction', the narrator calls you an "apple-polisher"), bizarre, whimsical, and philosophical.

I love games with a strong sense of place, and particular of fantastical places, so I enjoyed simply getting lost and wandering through this world - often I would wander around in circles, coming to places I had been to before; at other times I stumbled upon whole areas I had never been to before. Although the place descriptions mostly don't vary when you return to them, I did appreciate the 'hint system'(Spoiler - click to show):the slow loris in the tax office will tell you which areas of the game aren't worth returning to, and which require more exploration. Although of course the real problem is finding them again... As a Twine writer, I found myself thinking about how the game had been constructed: which passages linked to which, and when variables came into play.

If you wander far enough, you encounter one of several different Men, each of whom has a bit of wisdom to impart, and whose job you are allowed to take over, if you wish. (Spoiler - click to show) If you do accept, you reach an ending; if not, you collect a token from each one and carry on with your quest towards one of two winning endings. I'm not sure what the promised 'special surprise' was, although I did appreciate the 'I'm not a man' ending.

Of all the games in Spring Thing 2022, this is the one that I kept coming back to.

You are Qiuyi/Karen Zhao, a young Chinese-American who is home from university and celebrating New Year's Eve with friends and family - except that you suffer from terrible social anxiety and really, really do not feel like celebrating or even socialising at all. It's six hours until midnight. How will you fill all those hours?

This is a thoughtful, character-focused narrative written in Dendry, a choice-based format which is well suited to this story: Karen feels trapped, her options limited. Various social interactions are on offer, but all are difficult; other possibilities include taking a walk, eating from the buffet (I did a lot of that) and playing interactive fiction to pass the time.

This game did a really great job of simulating a social event that goes on for too, too long, and the feeling of having to find something to do to fill all those empty hours - but though the evening is boring, the game itself, the relationships described and the narrative voice, held my interest really well. If you check out the 'Credits' page, there is a Spotify playlist which I would have played while reading for extra atmosphere, if I'd read that bit at the start.

This is a really polished, professional game, and I must check out the prequel.

Twine can be used for storytelling: it can be poignant, sensitive and subtle. Or it can be used for gameplaying, with divergent paths and, if desired, a lot of ways to go wrong.

NNRNAJ is firmly in the second camp. This game's atmosphere is one of slapstick, and its basic premise absurdly pantomime-villainous, outrageous and exaggerated beyond anything remotely realistic. I enjoyed figuring it out, getting to the happy ending, and winning the day against the odious Mr Jett. That said, I agree with a lot of the points raised in other reviews: a few lines could have been toned down a bit, the option to punch Mr Jett in the face comes too soon in the story to be plausible (it could have waited until Ned has legitimate grounds to be annoyed at him), and one critical puzzle doesn't quite make sense.

While not a long game, NNRNAJ was complex enough to take me a while to get to the 'good' ending. Fortunately, it is divided into three acts, with a progressive hint system - particularly important in the second act, which took me a while to figure out. However, the 'bad' endings are many and varied enough to make it worth going on the wrong path a few times.

This is one of the most atmospheric and evocative Twine stories that I have read. The things you see and read on your mysterious journey seem full of meaning, yet I could not say what they mean exactly.

The strangeness and arbitrariness of some of the objects which you interact with allow for some workable puzzles, even in Twine: rather than logically figuring things out, as in a parser game, you need to visit various different locations several times and note when they change and where new links appear. Many of the passages and descriptions do nothing to move the plot onwards, but they serve to develop the atmosphere and act as red herrings as you try to find a way forward. The visuals were absolutely appropriate to the gloomy midnight setting - black background, white serif text with pale grey link text - but I found that I really needed to look closely in order to notice where the links were.

I first played Tethered two years ago, and it must have been one of the first parser games that I played, so it took me a few days to get my head around; as a relatively short game, it was an excellent introduction to the genre.

In the introduction to this "interactive role play", as the title page has it, you play Charles, a mountaineer, but the main part of the game is shown from the perspective of Judith, his unfortunate partner who is left alone in the snow. The early puzzles see her exploring a cave system and deal brilliantly with the logistics of navigating around it. The descriptions of these caves are atmospheric and help prepare for the unexpected shift in tone that slowly develops as the story continues.

I was puzzled, but quickly came to realise what was beginning to happen; but as I reached the very final stages of the story I became confused again - what was really going on? I never guessed until I read the deeply poignant ending, with its ironic twist on the title. Tethered has all the clever plotting of a good short story, but it is one in which you actually have to act out all the things that Judith would do while sheltering in the caves, even ones which the reader knows would be a bad idea - and there's a very good reason for that. For this alone, I would hold it up as a great example of how parser games can be an excellent medium for storytelling and even have features that conventional storytelling does not.

A short game about getting up in the morning and going to work, but with a twist ending. Plays with your expectations - there are some assumptions you make when you play a parser-based game, and it didn't really occur to me to question them here. Ironically enough, (Spoiler - click to show)when I got to the bit where you leave the house without locking it, I wondered if someone might break in when I was out at work.

If I hadn't been in such as hurry to get to work, I might have done what I normally do in parser games and (Spoiler - click to show)examine everything - in particular, to look under things and behind things. Of course, I did that on the replay.

One bit left me trying to guess a verb: (Spoiler - click to show)"get in cubicle" did the trick.

If I had to give someone a short game to play in order to teach them how to play a parser game, it'd probably be this.

Having previously read Summit, I was hoping for something good from Phantom Williams, and got it - not a story, but hundreds of fragments of stories, from hundreds of ruined civilisations.

There is something reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges here, or Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: instead of telling the entire story of a single world, why not take that idea to its logical conclusion and present only the fragments that would survive from such an event?

Many of the fragments are eerie, some are beautiful, others are a little disturbing. Some don't quite seem to qualify as apocalypses. But all leave you wondering: what happened here?

This is best read in bits and pieces, over a long period of time, and without any strategy, but simply by wandering from one passage to another.

(If you were wondering, the title quote comes from Apocalypse 189)

I read this a few years ago - it was the first piece of multimedia fiction that I had ever read, and it inspired me to go in search of internet-based fiction, which ultimately led me to IFDB.

17776 makes use of different formats - text, video, gif, even a calendar - to tell a rather bizarre but genuinely fascinating and original story. Reading through the first chapter in particular made me feel strangely unnerved and wonder what was going to happen. I don't want to give too much away, but it's set in the distant future when human life is extraordinarily different, and is told from an unusual perspective.

Although it's relatively low on the interactive elements, the multimedia aspect of it will appeal to people interested in new storytelling formats.

I appreciated Photopia above all as a short story. Alley's life is told through the medium of brief sections of text, presented out of chronological order, and not from her own perspective, but from the perspective of different people in her life. As in some of the short stories of Alice Munro, the reader takes these different fragments of time and pieces them together.

The framed sections, in coloured text, are outside of this world altogether: strange, imaginary landscapes. How do they relate to the main story? The reader has to figure it out. And the final scene reveals - to us, but not the main character - the ultimate source of these stories.

I found myself wanting more from the framed stories: there was enough description of the various fantasy landscapes to get me interested, but if they had been described in more detail, and allowed more "examine" responses, I would have been more interested in these parts. They may have benefited from some more complex puzzles. When I did get stuck, such as in the crystal maze, it wasn't the 'good stuck' feeling that comes from untangling something brainteasing.

The final revelation was an excellent twist. It made me wish the whole game was somewhat longer and more fully realised: we should be feeling that Alley is haunted by this buried memory, that it has been a part of her for her whole life and yet she doesn't know what it is.

I don't find myself as moved by Photopia as many other people do, even though it is obviously about a tragic event: I'd like the air of mystery and wonder to be greater, and for Alley's inner feelings to be explored in more depth (if that is possible, considering that it goes for the clever device of describing her through other people's eyes). But I can at least see the potential for a moving story in it.

I came to this game with high expectations, having previously played Tethered by the same author. The Impossible Bottle is diametrically different in atmosphere and setting - the only thing they have in common is that, in both games, objects aren't what they seem to be at first glance - but this is another excellent game by Linus Åkesson.

This game is based on one single, very strong and very thoughtfully worked-out idea: (Spoiler - click to show)a dollhouse which allows you to change the size and nature of items inside the actual house, and vice versa. This reminded me somewhat of a similar mechanic in (Spoiler - click to show)Emily Short's Metamorphoses, except in that game the solutions felt a bit more arbitrary and random, perhaps due to the more mystical atmosphere, whereas in The Impossible Bottle they were more logical and easier to figure out.

After having struggled through a couple of fiendish (but deeply, deeply enjoyable) games by Graham Nelson (both of which, if I'm not mistaken, are referenced in this game: try chatting to Nolan at different points in your progress), I appreciated the 'merciful' rating of this one, not to mention the hint system, which gave out tips without giving too much too quickly.

The child-centred view of the world ("this room is the best, because it's yours") was sweet and funny, and once I had figured out how to make the game 'work' it was great fun to (Spoiler - click to show)move different objects and change them from one thing to another. And there is a cuddly capybara in it.

What a strange and beautiful piece of interactive fiction!

Summit is based on a startling idea: that human beings must periodically expel living fish from their fishstomachs, and then swallow them, ultimately choosing a more gradual death over a prompt one. Somehow Phantom Williams manages to make this idea sound completely convincing within a few minutes.

The story is based on the desire for the far-off summit of the mountain, and the long journey that must be taken in order to reach it. I would have liked more time to have been spent expressing why the character desires to reach the mountain.

Your journey takes you through a number of different places, in each of which the people find a different way to deal with issues of death, fish, and ecstasy. Having played it through twice, I think the path taken by the character is roughly the same in different playings, but it's possible to skip parts and include or exclude other characters, and to make decisions about how to spend your time in each place, and how much time.

The style of frequent link-clicking, based on symbols which may or may not have significance, slows the story down and gives it an almost meditative feel. The descriptions of the places you visit are mysterious and beautiful, creating an excellent sense of atmosphere.

One question: it promises music, yet I couldn't see any way of turning it on (yes, I had sound switched on). Given the atmospheric nature of the piece, I would have loved to have heard that.

In this Twine short story, a great sense of atmosphere and suspense is created, not just by the use of images and sound, excellent as those are, but by thoughtful use of links: links that change text when you click on them, links that trigger a time delay, and changes of layout. I would have liked the plot to have developed more - it felt like reading the first half of a story.

Nevertheless, this is a good example of what I would consider multimedia fiction, where the interactivity provided by Twine is used not to give the reader a choice of narratives, but to provide atmosphere and to move the story onwards.

An interactive novella about coming out as transgender in early adulthood.

This is a Twine production that really feels like reading a story. Although each chapter ultimately leads you through a pre-determined plotline, your ability to make choices gives an added layer of agency to the narrative. The young protagonist deals with some difficult encounters, but there is a strong note of hope.

The addition of music, colour and background graphics makes this an extremely polished production indeed. It made me realise just what a Twine story can be.

I had played and enjoyed text adventure games before *Bronze*, but this was the first that I truly loved.

Based on the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast (not one I am very familiar with), this game is long enough to keep you busy for a while, with puzzles which are neither too simple nor infuriatingly difficult. But its greatest strengths are the atmosphere that it evokes, through the description of the castle and the objects in it - rich and Gothic, sometimes macabre - and the incredible storytelling: not just in the present day, but a whole history which leaves its traces in the castle, and which can be pieced together through paintings, objects, rooms and books. *Bronze* reminded me somewhat of Angela Carter's book *The Bloody Chamber*, a collection of modern retellings of fairytales with a dark but beautifully-described atmosphere.

An illuminating post on Short's blog explained how the story developed, leading to its various endings (CONTAINS SPOILERS: https://emshort.blog/2006/12/31/the-making-of-bronze/) - I never succeeded in finding one of these.

The 'go to' function is very much appreciated, and there is a tutorial mode for new players of IF. But the atmosphere and storytelling should appeal to players at all levels.

It is New Year's Eve, 1999, and a mysterious stranger drops you a piece of a seemingly ordinary jigsaw. But each piece turns out to be a gateway to a different event in the twentieth century. Can you make history?

I came to this game fresh from Nelson's wonderful game *Curses!*, looking for something similar. It simultaneously is and isn't. Like that of *Curses!*, *Jigsaw*'s a nicely large game world, which allows you to jump in and out of different times and different places. Each jigsaw piece is a mystery: where are you going to go next? The overall tone is considerably different to that of the earlier game: it is much more sombre, dealing with the tragedies and crises of the twentieth century. There is, however, a romance, and there are a few moments of humour(Spoiler - click to show), such as when you rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Each jigsaw piece is a relatively self-contained mini-game: actions taken in one chapter rarely have an impact on others. This may or may not appeal: I enjoyed the sprawling, ever-growing environment of *Curses!*, where an object found in one place might open up another area of the game; but it helped to be able to concentrate the mind on a small area, containing one or two puzzles. Some of the chapters were over quickly, with just one or two actions to complete; many puzzles were difficult, and I am grateful for Bonni Mierzejewska's walkthrough. Examine everything, look under things, and talk to characters.

Each chapter clearly has a great deal of historical research behind it (and there are footnotes to each one in the Help menu), so it's a game that is both informative and entertaining.

I came to Curses! as a relatively new, but not completely inexperienced, player of IF. I had recently completed Emily Short's rich and beautiful game Bronze, and was looking for a game to fill the gap, one with a fascinating atmosphere and which was long and challenging enough to get my teeth into. Curses! was everything I wanted, and more.

This game manages to combine a sense of awe and wonder with an excellent sense of humour, as a simple search for a map takes you on a journey through time and space, through the mysteries of the Tarot pack and of ancient Egypt, and into heaven and hell themselves, with the odd joke thrown in. The puzzles are good enough to get your brain going, and I was often proud of myself for figuring out some which were at first glance far too difficult. Whenever the going got a bit too tough, I consulted Russ Bryan's excellent walkthrough until I could progress further.

As some other reviewers have noted, some of the puzzles are very difficult, and others require some strange actions or choices of verb. I advise playing in 'long' mode, and noting that you can speak to characters (or non-human entities) by typing their name followed by a comma, and then what you want to say: e.g. 'Jemima, hello'. Examine everything, and try pushing and pulling things. Occasionally you will need to watch the actions of other characters, and imitate them. Although the game is huge, often you will find that the item you need is not far away from the puzzle it exists to solve.

I began Curses! shortly before the Coronavirus lockdown of spring 2020 and can honestly say that it kept me well occupied during this unexpected rise in alone time at home. If you like satisfying puzzles, ancient mysteries, classical civilisation, T. S. Eliot, slider puzzles, or cats, and don't mind consulting a walkthrough, then this is a game for you.