Ratings and Reviews by Wynter

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.

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.