Reviews by Wynter
Multimedia
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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.
Some things are darker than the Sea, December 18, 2022The 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.
Opened my eyes to multimedia fiction, August 28, 2021I 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.
Atmospheric multimedia fiction, March 28, 2021In 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.
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