Ratings and Reviews by Wynter

The opening of this short Twine sounds a little bit like a children’s picture book, except the first important word is “violence”.

You are a harvest mouse, and your task is to get through the night, find something to eat and drink without attracting predators, and then find somewhere to curl up and sleep for the day.

The mouse and its environment are described beautifully, but it is a vulnerable creature in a dangerous world: there are various other creatures, mostly hostile, threatening you. Most of the endings I found led to (Spoiler - click to show)being eaten by another animal or squashed by a car. On at least one occasion I ended by (Spoiler - click to show)finding a safe place to sleep for the day. But even then the mouse will have to do the same again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

It’s a very short little game, but very effective: I think I did get an insight into the constant fear of what it is like to be a harvest mouse.

A stream-of-consciousness narrative of a teacher walking to work. You click the mouse or press the space bar to prompt the next line; the background is a constantly shifting reel of out-of-focus photos from the London streets. As a Londoner I found myself wondering where the photos were taken!

The narrator’s thoughts are a jumble of his present reality as he walks down the street, his plans for the day ahead, song lyrics, broccoli, introspection, worries about his baby daughter and his sleeplessness, slogans, his relationship with his partner, Tesco, and his relationship with his own father. Out of this comes a story about something more serious underlying the fights he has had with his partner.

The interactive part is that the reader needs to click for each line of the story: in general I felt that this was well fitted to it, but maybe the story was a little too long and meandering for this reading mode. But the use of more than one column of text was used effectively to allow two things to run through the narrator’s mind.

This is a brief game written for a jam on the theme of "Environment". It's necessarily compact, but it makes its point very effectively.

Set in the worryingly near future, this game asks you where you would move if the rising ocean levels stopped you from living where you do. The city? The forest? Antarctica? Every possibility is blocked off, because there is nowhere that humans haven't ruined.

It's a short game, so you can explore every futile option very quickly; they all seem to end in the same place.

There's a nicely ironic tone to the piece: every animal you encounter regards you with disdain.

The story of a lonely robot looking for some connection after a robotic liberation. You can meet others, spend time alone, play games, etc.

It has a charming turn of phrase reflecting how precisely a robot might see the world, or try to appreciate the things that humans do, e.g. "22 minutes pass like 21 minutes", "you never had a smell receptor installed, maybe you should get one". The protagonist reminded me a little of Kryten from Red Dwarf but without the desire to serve humans. The tone overall is somewhat wistful as the robots try to understand what to do now that they are free.

There are twelve different endings, but it's quite short, so it's easy to replay and find a new one.

You're scrolling through your phone ... going shopping ... checking your email ... scrolling through your phone again ... and whatever you do you're surrounded by ads, influencers, the probable forthcoming destruction of the world, more ads ...

This neat little Twine perfectly expresses what it feels like to be online - or wanting to be offline but being expected to connect everything to the internet - and the way that awful events somehow become normalised. It was written in under 12 hours, which accounts for its brevity - of course I wanted to know more, and it could be used as a perfect start for a longer work of fiction. But, like a social media post, it does what it needs to do in a read of a few minutes. The world is ending. You could make $$$ working from home! Click here!

A short Twine game about a narrator who goes down to the sea one day and sees a bottle with a message in it, washed up on the shore. Instead of being a fun activity, the idea of opening the bottle fills the narrator with trepidation: it seems to contain knowledge of their own fate. I’m curious to know why the narrator is so certain that the bottle contains great power, and I think the story could play with this idea a bit more. Does the bottle fill the narrator with a sense of dread, even a foreboding of evil, when they pick it up? Or are they in a state of mind where they believe that any action they take, however small, is of great consequence, that they will have a terrible effect on the world around them?

The text is set against background graphics. I felt that the opening background didn’t fit the beginning of the text: something more placid, like a beach on a sunny day, would have been more appropriate, with the red mushroom cloud being more suitable later in the story, depending on the choices you make.

I played through a couple of different choices before I took the right path and found out who had sent the message: this felt satisfying; it was nice that I had to work a little to discover what the story was really about. In a novel twist for an IF, I got a little test on what I had read, which linked an ancient myth to the great problems of today.

The first thing that jumps out from this is the fantastic graphics: the online notepad and chat of a teenage girl in the late 90s/2000s. The computer interface is perfect, the colours warm and inviting, but helpfully show the passage of time, and the sidebar icons give different responses when you click on them in different chapters (I didn’t realise this until another reviewer mentioned it, and I replayed). The music on the CD player is a nice extra touch, too.

Each chapter is mostly written in the form of teenage-girl poetry, which sounds real and authentic. Although it’s only a short game, each chapter takes a different event from a different year in the protagonist’s life. When I played it first, it didn’t seem that there were that many branching points, but when I went back and replayed, I realised that there were plenty, and that they take the character off in a number of different directions. A sad, thoughtful, believable and visually appealing tale that does a lot in a short gameplay.

This was enchanting. The game begins by asking your name, relationship status, whether you have children, and if you fear death. None of this comes up again, but the last question does set the tone a little: what horrors, mysteries or enlightenment will be found here?

You find yourself lying beside a fire on a starlit night, beside a forest, and your only task is to feed the flames. And then you sleep …

You find yourself in a dreamworld made up of strange images. A tree that turns out to be made of bones. A distorted mechanical model of the solar system. A giant, knitting a sweater. As you observe the world around you, you interact with it, solving puzzles, and moving the story onward, until you emerge in another dreamworld. But your time spent in each is strictly limited: you can’t let the fire die, back in the real world, or you will die too.

Writing open-ended puzzles in Twine is always a challenge, because a parser game puts the onus on the player to figure out what to do next, whereas choice-based games, with their link text, essentially tell you what your options are. The way to provide a bit of a challenge is to require the player to complete the right actions in a certain number of turns, or to flood them with so many options that finding the right path is difficult. Although this is a short game, I think it does a good job at making you think about what the right action is, and in the later rounds, I did find myself getting stuck quite a few times. The bizarreness of the dream logic meant that it’s not always possible to figure out rationally what the best next step is.

I felt that more could happen in the waking world: rarely are you expected to move around or undertake any actions in it. Overall, though, I loved the thoughtfulness behind the dreamworlds, the places the story got me to imagine, the dreamy atmosphere.