Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

Superlunary is one of the coolest things I've seen in recent-ish twine. I love the look of the interface, the art, and the way different forms of interactivity are mixed. The story itself is pretty interesting; it takes place after a revolution that brought a government which seeks to end wars by destroying all remaining weapons. You play as a team of three people, led by a member of the disarmed military, who go around space trying to dismantle old weapons and help random people. Much of the story focuses on the team members' complicated relationships with each other, and their personal histories.

This game uses both the twine and bitsy systems. Bitsy is a simple game engine which basically allows for 2d walking simulators. Through bitsy, the game includes visually navigating around outer space and walking around a planet. In twine, the game includes clickable images, dialogue, and messages. Since apparently twine and bitsy don't share variables, the only way the content between the engines is shared is via passcodes provided in bitsy, which are then entered in the twine UI when they are learned by the player. I just thought it was pretty cool.

I don't know if it would work well from an accessibility standpoint though. Is bitsy usable with things like screen readers?

One complaint I have is that there isn't really much interactivity in the sense of making "meaningful choices". The dialogues are all click-to-advance, and the bitsy portions are basically linear corridors. The player choice basically consists of deciding which order to visit the planets. But I don't really mind as long as the story is interesting, which it is.

Anyway, this is apparently the first chapter of a hopefully greater story. I'm really looking forward to it.

So. Homestuck is a webcomic by Andrew Hussie that ran from 2009 to 2016, and is in some ways still ongoing. It was very interactive-fiction-inspired, for example with the page-advancing links in the format of parser commands, and text adventure-like descriptions of room objects. In addition, there are interactive segments in the comic. So it makes sense that there will be fanfiction of Homestuck written as IF (although this is a twine game, not a parser game, there are other parser homestuck fanfics). Among the relatively limited world of Homestuck fangames, this is one of my favorites.

This is a story taking place from the perspective of Jane Crocker, one of the main characters of Act 6 of Homestuck. She has just been mind-controlled by the Condesce, an insectoid fish alien who is the empress of the mostly extinct troll race and is also Betty Crocker, Jane's adoptive ancestor (it makes sense in context, sort of). Now, Jane serves the Condesce's will, doing her bidding in her plan to recreate the old troll empire. She's forced to hurt her friends and do stuff against her former interests.

The story is about Jane's existence under mind control. There are always multiple options on each screen, to try to get free or fight back, but clicking on any but the "correct" one, the options that commit harm and are forced by mind control, causes the screen to shake and flash red. Clicking on these links too much will cause Jane's brain to explode. "Denial of agency" and "player complicity" are pretty common techniques in IF, but I think this game works particularly well. Also I enjoyed the writing which captures the flavor of the darker side of the webcomic, while having its own distinct prose style.

I've started to wonder what would have happened if Hanako had stayed in the IF community rather than move to visual novels, and if Porpentine had moved to visual novels rather than twine. What if a twine version of LLtQ was submitted to IFComp 2012, and a visual novel version of Howling Dogs was published at Steam? How would the gaming world have changed?

The author apparently participated in the IF community in the early 2000s as Papillon, creating One Week among other games. One Week is a time management game with visual novel/dating sim-like mechanics, where the choice is of which action to perform each turn. LLtQ follows the same genre. The main choices involve time management: what to study each week, and where to spend your free time. There are also CYOA segments for major events. The ultimate goal here is to help Elodie (the titular queen) survive until her coronation, and hopefully become the kind of person who would be a good queen.

LLtQ is a difficult game. The "cruelty scale" doesn't really work for choice-based stories, but basically it is possible to die in a copious amount of locations, and there is no forewarning of death. There are unlimited save slots, but it is difficult to pinpoint the exact point at which your failure has become inevitable, and trying to avoid that failure could lead to a different fail state. Helpfully, the stat checks are explicitly given on both successes and failures.

LLtQ has a *lot* of stats, and a lot of little branches based on these stats. However, most stats will only be used a few times; some are only useful once (but that one time will save your life). The time-management gameplay is an optimization problem; how do you best allocate your training time so that you'll pass the key stat checks by certain events? Like in a lot of visual novels, it basically boils down to making a plan of which choices to make at which times, except there is a much larger space of choices than most choice-based games. This often requires replaying, which is encouraged by a fast-forward mechanism. By replaying, you learn the important moments where death is inevitable unless certain checks are met, the "bottleneck" part of the branch-and-bottleneck structure.

Oh yeah, there's also the art, writing, music, setting, etc. LLtQ is a visual novel with anime-esque artwork. The setting is basically a medieval fantasy with rather detailed worldbuilding around its history and politics. Most characters have hidden sides to them, but only some of them are plotting to murder you. There is a dating sim element where you can potentially find Elodie a partner, and there are a lot of interesting character moments that can be missed by not passing the relevant stat checks.

Update: Half of this review is now outdated because the complete version of Bee for dendry has been released. I still agree with this review, and if anything have gained a new appreciation for Bee from having taken a small part in its development. There are a lot of intricacies in how the story is told, and how it uses the medium of interactive fiction. Bee is amazing and I recommend it for anyone interested in narrative design or just a meaningful slice-of-life story.

Old review:

I had the good fortune of being able to play Bee before Varytale disappeared from the internet. It was one of the first pieces of IF I played/read, and was part of what made me fall in love with interactive fiction. Unfortunately, Bee in its original form is no longer online; the Dendry version is playable only up to a point. Even so, I think it is well worth playing in its current form.

Comparing the original Varytale version to the Dendry version that is currently online, it is apparent that there is a lot missing. Dendry does not have the visible stat display or character lists, which makes the choice process almost akin to fumbling in the dark. The only indicator of time are the occasional Christmas, Easter, and Halloween events. In addition, the Dendry version does not have the ending scenes (I checked the code; the endings are not present), so instead of ending with the final spelling bee, the story just fizzles out once a certain time has been reached.

Still, I think the Dendry version should be played, if only to experience Emily Short's writing. The scenes that do exist are excellently written, and you can get up to the first spelling bee with zero issues. Also, since the code is available, it is theoretically possible to fix at least some of the problems, like adding stat displays back in...

There's already been a lot said about Bee's story in the reviews here. It really resonated with me, as someone who competed in academic competitions when I was younger. The protagonist has a sense of alienation from both her own family and from the broader American culture as a whole, and she has trouble relating to others and uses spelling as a coping mechanism. Through the player's choices, she can become rebellious, or participate in the spelling bee to the fullest, going all the way to the nationals before getting runner-up (this scene is not in the Dendry version). Even as the player subtly molds her personality, the current of alienation always remains.

The primary way the story is structured is through the progression of time. At each "turn", the player is given a choice of three randomly chosen storylets, each of which is a mini-CYOA scene. Some storylets have higher priority than others, and most are dependent on either a specific time of year or on certain stats. A lot of storylets repeat, especially the spelling practice scenes, which does get kind of tiresome after a while.

Dendry itself has probably become my favorite HTML interactive fiction framework, and my recent game, which was kind of/very inspired by Bee, happens to use Dendry.

RIP Varytale :(

The Arboretum is an introspective romance story. It is basically a linear click-to-advance story/kinetic novel (I'm reluctant to call it hypertext even), with only one choice at the end that is more reflective than anything else. However, I appreciated the writing enough that it worked for me.

The story is told as a flashback from two perspectives: the protagonists are middle-class Asian-American high school students living in a college town in Texas, Derek and Lillian (upon re-reading, I don't know if Lillian is Asian-American, but Derek is). Both of them are introverted and socially isolated, and both of them are not really interested in the paths that are pushed onto them by their academically-oriented families. Despite being a little stereotypical, this depiction rang true to me. Eventually, Derek asks Lillian on a possible date, and she accepts. They hang out at a mall, and later go on a date to an arboretum, hence the title.

Most of the sentences in the story are introspective, providing Derek and Lillian's inner monologues. They both have their own anxieties, Derek about being a "real man" and living up to expectations, Lillian about her lack of a stable identity and her literary imagination. The two of them connect through acting out roles as anime and video game characters, of playing at and abandoning pretenses, of revealing tidbits of their "true selves" insofar that such a thing exists. Maybe it's just my personal biases, but I really liked the writing in these bits. It feels self-aware and lacks the self-importance of a lot of coming-of-age stuff.

The story ends with Derek and Lillian fast-forwarded 10 years. They've grown up and have real jobs now, never meeting each other since high school, and they both have memories of their past meeting, filtered through nostalgia. Will they meet again? That's the one choice at the end of the story, after which it immediately ends.

The author has done a lot of other work in games, including writing Eliza, one of my favorite visual novels. So I'm probably a little biased here. I would say that this story is similar to Lilium and other introspective and nostalgic twine stories.