Ratings and Reviews by Wynter

This was my first Infocom game. Perhaps inevitably, I'm seeing it through the lens of later puzzle games, which are often larger and have a more complex parser, rather than seeing it as the original players did - and in particular I found myself comparing it to Jigsaw, which I gather was intended as a kind of homage to Trinity.

You are an American tourist in London's Kensington Gardens, doing a bit of sightseeing when a nuclear bomb goes off. However, it takes you into a surreal otherworld where not everything is as it seems. From here, you can enter various real-world locations, linked by the development of the atomic bomb, where small puzzles must be solved before progressing to the testing of the first atom bomb. I liked the fact that we get to meet one character at two different points in their life, bringing extra meaning to the story, and knowing that we managed to (Spoiler - click to show)save one person from the Nagasaki bomb.

Much of what makes the game interesting is the interplay of the surreal and symbolic with the terrible reality of nuclear war. Kensington Gardens is described accurately, but populated by characters from Mary Poppins (nannies with perambulators, a woman selling breadcrumbs to feed the birds with): personally, I would have opened the game in a more contemporary, 1980s setting. The main game area is an intriguing and explorable fantasy world: I found myself wanting a bit more meaningful symbolism here, but a rewarding Let's Play on intfiction.org pointed out the significance of the locations of the different doors, and their relationship to the zodiac symbols. The 'chapters' are deeply sinister, featuring well-described military bases, armed guards and nuclear explosions (the most poignant moment in the game was if you (Spoiler - click to show)don’t solve the Nagasaki puzzle in time, and die saving the girl's life); yet some of the solutions to the puzzles break this realism(Spoiler - click to show) (the flying origami bird, and the surprising willingness of animals to respond to verbal requests). I would have liked these chapters to have been somewhat longer and more complex, with more in-chapter puzzles to solve, but perhaps their brevity is due to technical constraints on space.

The endgame is more difficult: I was more heavily reliant on the Invisiclues and walkthrough there. The research that went into this section is impressive, and several puzzles need to be completed against the clock. Aside from the (Spoiler - click to show)magic boots and the comic presence of the roadrunner, the tone here is technical, urgent and sombre, and the consequences of failure are immediate and devastating.

As I have said, I suspect that I am unfairly comparing the game to Jigsaw and other more complex later games in the same genre. But that shouldn't be allowed to detract from the significance of Trinity: a game for the enjoyment of adventure, puzzle-solving, and an eerie atmosphere, but also for a reflection on the seriousness of nuclear war.

You're on a chat forum late at night, and another poster is on the train home ... except it should have reached its destination by now. Instead, it arrives at a station which does not appear on any map at all ...

Together with a number of other, anonymous posters, you offer advice to Hasumi: stay on the train? Get off? Call your parents? The forum is dedicated to occult happenings, and there is a suggestion that Hasumi's experiences are something out of Japanese folklore. The horror and supernatural elements are muted, but the sense of being afraid in the dark is very believable. Sometimes silence is the most unnerving thing, particularly in the case of the bad endings. (I think I found at least four or five, both good and bad.)

The forum format, and the way that messages mostly appear in real time, is an excellently realistic experience. Different colours are used to distinguish between different posters, in the absence of usernames.

I had a great time with this.

You need to go to the supermarket for milk, and possibly some MagiMuffins. Except this is no ordinary supermarket! Enigmart has an app which will give you generous discounts - so far, so 2026, except here you have to solve puzzles to get your 25% off.

The puzzles, mostly food-themed, were excellent - mostly pitched at the right level to get my brain going without being too hard. I had to come back to some of them and think again (the Creatine Crunch cereal was maddening until the penny suddenly dropped). And every one gave me that wonderful sense of satisfaction when I figured it out. A hint system is offered relatively late on in the game - I needed to use it twice.

There is a subgenre of IF which deals in wordplay and puzzles, and this is a worthy addition to it. Well done!

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.