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.

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.

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.

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.

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.