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1 people found the following review helpful:
A shallow remake, August 11, 2023Set in a psych ward, this very short dating-sim will let you explore the building, meet different Edits and Nikis. Some of them even invite you on a date after some extremely short small talk. There are four possible endings.
I appreciate shortness in games, the ones that go to the point and don't waste time with meandering or going around the bush. Being able to tell a complete story concisely is an impressive skill. But not every story can be or should be told concisely. Some need a bit more fluff to tie parts together. This is one of the issue with this game.
4E2N is actually a remake of The 4 Edith, a Twiny Jam entry of less than 300 words. This game ditched the pictures, changed the Edith into Edit (or was it a typo?), added Nikis, and fluffed up the small talk between the characters and the descriptions of the environment. Even adding an extra choice at the start.
Going into the psych yard, you are given a choice between entering the building or stay outside a bit longer. This can be repeated until a resident come bother you about a topic you don't seem to care about. Inside the building, you can visit multiple locations, each populated by one of the Edith or the Niki. Small talk ensue (or not), before you move on to another location. Once you feel it is time to go home, you are presented with four locations, each where you meet again an Edith, prompting the ending of the game.
Aside from getting extra locations, you are able to go back and forth in the history to see other endings without having to reload the game.
Still, the remake feels off. The pages have many typos and formatting issues (especially when it comes to naming the Ediths - Even the title of the game is unclear on whether it is Edit or Edith) and lack of consistence (the characters pronouns or POV). Meeting the different characters feel incredibly shallow (is that the point the game is trying to make? I mean who goes dating in a psych ward), and neither endings feel satisfying, or much fun. One major issue I have with the remake is the addition of the Nikis, only to be told in the final choice The Niki are not yet/no longer available…
In terms of the gameplay, aside from the game not even registering whether you've met the different Edit(h?)s or the Nikis, there is not much to it. Your choices feel quite inconsequential and hollow. It could have been nice to see you accept or refuse a date, bringing your date to a different place, or learn of what happened to the other dates if you didn't meet with them.
The game feels quite unfinished and incomplete, the story even in its shortness is both straightforward and confusing. After replaying I wasn't sure whether I was a resident of the psych ward or whether the Edits and Nikis were truly human.
Was there something in the game I just didn't get? Or was it submitted as a bad joke? I don't know...
- Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 21, 2023
- wisprabbit (Sheffield, UK), July 1, 2023
- Edo, May 18, 2023
- Sophia de Augustine, April 14, 2023
- Wanderlust, December 17, 2022
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Food is terrible and the portions are small, December 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I sometimes worry that I give short games short shrift – I mean I guess in a way that would be appropriate, as often there’s just less to say about a game that says less and in the attention-economy it’s easy to equate length with value. But still, there’s a lot to admire in a game that knows how long it should be, knows that the 90-second punk-rock version of a song is often strictly better than the 12-minute prog-rock version. In last year’s Comp, I adored some shorter games, like Funicular Simulator 2021, Closure, and My Gender is a Fish (I only just now realized that sometime in the last year my memory had invisibly renamed this game to I am a Fish, which of course would be the title of the inevitable genderqueer Faulkner mashup) – they didn’t need to maunder on endlessly to make an impression.
Sometimes, though, short games are too short to adequately develop their ideas, and sadly, such is the case with 4 Edith + 2 Niki. Per the blurb, this is a dating sim, implemented in basic-Twine style, though it takes a couple minutes to reveal itself as such. You start outside a shanty, given a choice of whether to enter or stay outside. If you choose the latter, you’re treated to a series of increasingly random vignettes with questionable grammar, before being railroaded into going outside. Here’s the last, so you get a flavor:
"You decide to stay longer. A horrible young man appears and names him a coffee-mouthed boy. Marvel starts entertaining with stories, especially the X-Men, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange sequels. After a while, though, it’s just Enter…"
Once inside, it turns out the shanty is a spacious office, with six different sub-locations to explore; two have people named Niki inside them, and four have people named Edit (not Edith), each with a different number to distinguish them. The various Edits will ask you on dates or mention an event they’re going to, and after visiting all the rooms you decide which of the four to pursue, at which point the game ends with a different, but identically-cynical, ending involving you getting coupled-up with that iteration of Edit. Like, here’s the one where you go get Slovak food with Edit 1 (I’m like a quarter Slovak, and since that’s an especially random ethnicity even by the low-stakes standards of Eastern Europe you’d better believe I picked that first when I saw it was an option):
"You decide to go to the Museum Village, where you will meet Edit 1. At first you fuck like rabbits, but less and less often, and you can listen to his head-voiced laughter at his shitty jokes. Plus, by the end, you’re completely silly."
Lest you think this is an outlier, punishing those who foolishly think Slovak food sounds like a good time – lots of love to my grandmother, but so far as I could tell from her cooking, flour dumplings, sausages, and doughy pastries were the highlights of the cuisine – here’s the one where you go to a concert:
"You went to the Anne and the Barbies concert and then you became a couple. Over the years, you realize that she’s a little hysterical, but which woman isn’t. That’s all there is to it."
That sounds pretty misogynist, but maybe it’s a knowing pun, you know like hysterical → hystera → uterus? This is awfully abbreviated to try to draw conclusions from, though, and indeed, that’s how I feel about the game as a whole. Is this meant as a satire of dating sims, making fun of the idea that you make a few low-context choices and you wind up mated for life? Is it trying to say something about the banality of identity in modern society by having all the romantic options have the same name? Is the juxtaposition of dateable Edits and standoffish Nikis (one’s implied to be an ex) getting at the sometimes-arbitrary way people present themselves or don’t present themselves as potential partners? Is the fact that the only option you have is which of these people to date, with remaining self-assuredly single not even a fail state or but-thou-must false choice like the one in the opening, trying to critique the normativity of coupledom, a la Lanthimos’s The Lobster?
I dunno, man, nor do I know what that any of that has to do with Iron Man or TARDIS-like shanties that contain office buildings. It just feels like stuff, and while individual vignettes have some disorienting zip, there’s just not enough here – not enough characters or plot or engagement – for them to cohere into anything with impact.
- E.K., December 7, 2022
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Bro-Tone, an IF implementation, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
4 Edith + 2 Niki proclaims itself a dating sim, but this game is not what those words suggest to me. It all feels very slapdash. You enter on the grounds of psychiatric hospital I think. This setting is almost never referenced again. I guess you work there, because you are presented with a corridor of offices to visit. The descriptive text of what is on this corridor does not match the choices on offer. This is a befuddling choice. Twine lets you embed the destinations in the description itself, it’s MORE work to provide two (incompatible) versions! You visit all 6 rooms, barely interact with their occupants, then pick one to date. One of the choices here is a date that was not referenced in ANY of your initial conversations so you kind of have to deduce who it’s referring to. Did I mention one of the interactions has a weird sexual harassment vibe?
Selecting the date presents an end screen. That’s it. No time to build Sparks of Joy let alone Engagement, though the text was really too awkward to supply either of those anyway. Besides its really rushed presentation, the thing that sticks out most is the amped up Bro tone of the thing.
Bear with me while I expand a bit on the genus and phylum of Bro-tone. All Bro-tone comes from the same extended lineage that culminated in the 80s/90s teen sex farces. Its key hallmarks were 1) faintly knuckleheaded cis dumbasses 2) carefree good humor 3) treating women as sex objects to achieve and 4) inhabiting narratives where the world happily rewarded all of those. (There was another gene, 5) Gay Panic, that is not relevant here.) And it was toxic as hell, once we looked at it close enough. Prominent in movies like Porkies, and I don’t know Joy Sticks (deep cut!), but really you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a cineplex and not hit one back then. Nowadays it is most readily identified by its excessive, prejorative use of the word ‘woke.’
There was a key mutation in the late 80’s that forked the line. I’m speaking of course of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This mutation dramatically diluted gene #3 above, and somehow made the species stronger. Suddenly, knuckleheaded amiability could rise unfettered by toxicity. Subsequent mutations actually flipped the gene to engage women as people, and even modified #5. At first haltingly in supporting characters in American Pie, then fully-fledged in Neighbors or its Final Boss form, Josh Segarra in his roles in She-Hulk and The Other Two. Spoiler alert, this is NOT the Bro-tone phylum 4E+2N showcases.
The Bro-tone main line had another mutation in the last 4-7 years - a new gene of mocking self-awareness. Where the joke is how awful the main line is by subtly amplifying the meanness of the worst if its excesses. A great example of this line is Michael Che’ on SNL’s Weekend Update. He deadpan advocates the most insane, exaggerated Bro-tone behaviors for laughs. Colin Jost’s role here is indispensable - his comedically beleaguered disapproval is vital to the identification of this strain. Superficially it is so similar to the main branch they can easily be mistaken for each other.
And these separate-but-similar Bro-tones are where we are in 4E+2N. My first ending I was presented with (Spoiler - click to show)"Over the years, you realize that she's a little hysterical, but which woman isn't."
My impulse was to hear it in Michael Che’s voice and snorted in amusement. My second ending had a less over-the-top but clearly still Bro-tone blurb that made me question what I was looking at. As I contemplated a third run, I realized I was holding a Schroedinger’s cat box. At this point, the game was in superposition between the two Bro-tone lines. If I opened the box with a third run, it was going to concretize into one or the other. I don’t think I want that.
Played: 10/31/22
Playtime: Less than 10min, two runthroughs.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? I dare not trifle with the quantum superposition.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Sobol (Russia), November 4, 2022
- Ola (Sweden), November 3, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Not much here, October 31, 2022This game is apparently about selecting parties. It is chaotic and confusing, but not in a good way. You are in a courtyard that contains several offices, within each is a character looking to have a fun time. (Spoiler - click to show) After browsing your options, you get to pick who to visit. A small paragraph describing the encounter appears on screen and the game just ends. There is no story structure.
I find it so frustrating when Twine games do not have any indicator that the game is over, and instead either leave the player with a blank screen or a screen with text minus a concluding passage (does not necessarily have to be link) that confirms that the game is over. Just some indicator will do. Otherwise, I get the impression that I came across a broken page. It is like someone singing and they decide not to sing the last line. This game (Spoiler - click to show) opts for the latter, and they hardly feel like endings.
Visually, everything is organized well enough. Then again, there is hardly anything to critique because the game is so short. It sticks with the standard visual model of black screen, white text, and purple links. But that is the only positive in this game.
4 Edith + 2 Niki is too incomplete for this competition. It was tough to even find the game’s main idea and story. Feel free to check it out if you want, it will only take up a minute of your time.
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
A Dissapointing Dating Simulator, October 21, 2022 I have no idea if using the term "short" is even the right word to use for this game. It says dating simulator when there is no proper dating involved except for some awkward lines written when you choose with whom to go on a date.It jumps from the presentation phase straight to the date.
Even the 'Edit 1,2,3,4' who are available for the dating, only have a tiny description. Some of the "character presentation/meeting you for the first time" sentences are even more awkward.
There is a serious need for some massive rewriting on this game if the author wants to get a higher rating.
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), October 20, 2022
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Very short Twine game about picking a partner, October 20, 2022From the picture, blurb, and length on the IFComp page (which I swear used to say 2 hours, but I think I must have misread it because now it says 15), I expected this game to a big, polished Twine game with cool visuals, like Porpentine's Crystal Warrior Ke$ha.
Unfortunately, this is a very short Twine game with 1 major area, with simple links to rooms and back (each room being one passage). State doesn't seem be to be tracked at all. Almost all the endings are just vague statements that you slept with someone.
I think the author can do better. This kind of game can be written up in 30 minutes or an hour. That doesn't mean you can't make a great game in that time, but it's hard and needs good luck. I'd like to see more length and/or effort and/or cool new idea.
- scotttalent, October 19, 2022
- jaclynhyde, October 16, 2022
- VanishingSky (Nanjing, China), October 5, 2022
Minimalist Romance, October 5, 2022
This game is just about as brief as they come. There were so few details that I didn't really get any imagery in my mind. However, it did create a certain feel. Rather than describe what it was like, I would say give it a try. It's so quick, you may as well experience it to make up your own mind.
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