Wolfgirls in Love

Two wolves go out for a night on the town. Neon. Cobblestones.

Written for Porpentine's Twiny Jam, in which one creates a Twine game within 300 words, the author eschews spartan sentences, instead using single words, linked with timed appearances.

The combination of music, macros and the individual words makes Wolfgirls in Love incredibly evocative, and evokes loss and love and relief with the briefest of brushstrokes.

This game relies as much on graphics and music as it does on the text; the timed appearances give a rhythm to the text that the words alone do not. Wolfgirls in Love is a fascinating illustration of what 300 words in Twine can do, but equally also a gripping, bite-size story in itself.

(This review was originally published with modifications at https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/wolfgirls-in-love/)

...but unfortunately, I found that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Don't get me wrong, the parts are all very nice. The presentation is pretty great - one word at a time, in most cases, with a hyperlink at the end of a series of related words. The story is conveyed with extreme minimalism, and the first part felt quite poetic.

It's a cute idea, and the overall theme it explores is cute, but at a certain point it seemed to lose its charm - (Spoiler - click to show)someone's shooting of one of the girls is abrupt and kind of lame, and it tore me right out of the atmosphere. But not in a good way, like you'd expect from such a twist. Instead, it made me think oh, this is random and sudden and cliché. In fact, tellingly, the suddenness (Spoiler - click to show)actually made me sympathize with the shooter. And the ending felt like a cop-out, after all that.

Plus, repetition kind of bogged the experience down. I understand that these girls are in love; the word kissing three or four times doesn't make me understand it any more. People who are in love do things other than kiss. Maybe it's just me, but the repetition made the experience feel kind of corny toward the end.

I recommend trying it out, though - for all the storytelling flaws I've pointed out, it's definitely unique and worth your four minutes.