Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

The only place where this game is still available is ifarchive. The website that hosted it is gone, which I feel like is a fitting end to the story.

This is a story about relationships mediated through the internet. The protagonist is a college student who meets a slightly older woman on an online forum. They bond via fiction writing and anime fandom, and the college student develops a deep crush. Everything about the story feels incredibly real and human, and the writing carries it through. It's a story about adolescence and impermanence and death, about how people change and grow apart. It just really spoke to me, I guess, as someone who grew up on the internet.

Lilium was originally written for the Naked Twine Jam in 2014, which was supposed to host Twine games without fancy formatting and styles. This game fits; it uses the default Twine theme with blue links and nothing else. There is not much that can be found about the jam online anymore, and half of the games submitted appear to be permanently gone. I'm just glad this game was able to make it through.

This game has many thematic similarities with Christine Love's other work: lesbians, historical East Asian cultures, and the oppression of women. I really enjoyed her games like Analogue: A Love Story, so it's fascinating to see how much she has evolved. The writing, characterization, and integration of historical themes are great, as expected, while the story is basically linear as far as I can tell.

The primary interaction mechanic is writing Chinese characters by mouse (or maybe finger or stylus?) on an HTML canvas. Sometimes, you are teaching others how to write characters. But the main events are the magic battles where writing certain characters can deal damage, heal you, or enhance your magical powers. This is a pretty unique mechanic in interactive fiction or even within games in general, and fits the theme very well.

Unfortunately, the handwriting input does not work well. Oftentimes, a correct character would not be recognized at all, or be recognized as a different character (I am a semi-native Mandarin speaker and these are mostly simple characters). The time-limited and tense battles makes this rather frustrating. Looking at other open source javascript hanzi/kanji recognition libraries, the results do not seem to be promising either. There have to be some solutions out there that would work (maybe if one looked beyond the English-speaking internet?)...