Reviews by Wynter

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.

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.

Twine can be used for storytelling: it can be poignant, sensitive and subtle. Or it can be used for gameplaying, with divergent paths and, if desired, a lot of ways to go wrong.

NNRNAJ is firmly in the second camp. This game's atmosphere is one of slapstick, and its basic premise absurdly pantomime-villainous, outrageous and exaggerated beyond anything remotely realistic. I enjoyed figuring it out, getting to the happy ending, and winning the day against the odious Mr Jett. That said, I agree with a lot of the points raised in other reviews: a few lines could have been toned down a bit, the option to punch Mr Jett in the face comes too soon in the story to be plausible (it could have waited until Ned has legitimate grounds to be annoyed at him), and one critical puzzle doesn't quite make sense.

While not a long game, NNRNAJ was complex enough to take me a while to get to the 'good' ending. Fortunately, it is divided into three acts, with a progressive hint system - particularly important in the second act, which took me a while to figure out. However, the 'bad' endings are many and varied enough to make it worth going on the wrong path a few times.

This is one of the most atmospheric and evocative Twine stories that I have read. The things you see and read on your mysterious journey seem full of meaning, yet I could not say what they mean exactly.

The strangeness and arbitrariness of some of the objects which you interact with allow for some workable puzzles, even in Twine: rather than logically figuring things out, as in a parser game, you need to visit various different locations several times and note when they change and where new links appear. Many of the passages and descriptions do nothing to move the plot onwards, but they serve to develop the atmosphere and act as red herrings as you try to find a way forward. The visuals were absolutely appropriate to the gloomy midnight setting - black background, white serif text with pale grey link text - but I found that I really needed to look closely in order to notice where the links were.