Reviews by autumnc

This game feels like the culmination of the genre of twines that started with howling dogs. It might be overstating to call it the apex of twine, but that's how I personally feel.

SPY INTRIGUE is a story with many layers to it, and somehow it works on each of these layers as well as all together. At the beginning it seems to be a wacky, vaguely sexually charged spy adventure. Then you die and see a story about mental illness, gender, relationships, living in A Society, and all that, all excellently written. But deeper into the spy missions, the themes wrap back around into full earnestness in a way that's difficult for me to describe. I usually bounce off video game comedy, but the humor in this game is genuinely funny. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, the best updog joke in video games. Hearing the word "mumps" still makes me want to laugh in a socially inappropriate manner; I wish I could talk about "SPY MUMPS" irl without being ostracized.

I love the interface too, especially the story map, which shows the current node and all the nodes leading out of the current node, annotated with colors for whether they lead to death, an aside, or story progress.

(Spoiler - click to show)One of the segments, the death scene where the protagonist tries on their parent's clothing, really got to me in a deeply personal way; I still go back just to read this one passage.

The Lost Heir series eschews the Choice of Games design philosophy in which all paths should be valid and failures should be interesting. This is a difficult game. There are many paths through this story, and it is difficult to die in the first game of the series, but some paths are objectively better than others.

Like many visual novels and gamebooks, the difficulty is in designing a path through the game in which the player character survives and achieves their goals. This involves raising certain stats to the necessary level by key points in the story, and not letting health decrease too low. Unlike in many other stat-heavy choicescript games, the player cannot simply focus on one or two stats; a pure magic user can't expect to get by on magic alone, for example. There are a large number of stats, divided into abilities, skills, knowledge, and relationships. Usually, the stat being checked is well cued, but not always. Only passing stat checks will raise the stat while failing checks will lose health, leading to potential death spirals where the player fails one check after another. I think it is expected that a player will play through multiple times to learn the checks and stat gains and to find a route that leads to a desired ending. Overall, it felt somewhat like Long Live the Queen in terms of the stat-check gameplay, but with fewer deaths.

The story itself takes place in a seemingly generic fantasy setting, where the player character is the titular "lost heir" seeking to reclaim the throne from evil usurpers. Despite the typical setting and plot, it was easy for me to become engrossed in this game. The writing is decent, and I really felt like I needed to find a way to save my favorite characters. There are a number of romance options as is usual in choicescript, who are described in broad strokes in this volume. The romance options themselves are also pretty heavily stat-gated.

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?)...