Beware The Faerie Food You Eat

I've been trying to go back and review games I remember playing but somehow forgot to review.

This game is one of Astrid Dalmady's earliest games. Her twine games were the first twine games I every enjoyed playing, back in 2015, and got me started playing more.

This game is fairly brief but branches a lot, with 10 endings. Most endings can be found by falling on the wayside.

You play as someone about to enter the faerie realm through a mushroom ring, hoping to find something you lost (which you can select at the beginning). You remind yourself that, whatever else you do, you must not eat the food the faeries bring.

The UI and styling are great here, and the game pulls out some neat tricks. I played to two endings, but there's enough sameness in replays that I didn't look for the other endings.

You've heard that faerie, if you treat them right, will grant you any wish. That's why you've sought out a faerie ring, to step into the other world.

Like Dalmady's other work, BtFFYE is a beautifully designed Twine work, with stylistic (and judicious) use of rhyming. There aren't really outright puzzles, though there's a bit where Dalmady does some rather clever things with the text... 'nuff said.

Each scene plays on the tranquil image of elves and fairies playfully cavorting in the woods, combined with common stories: that cold iron will stave off the fae, that eating or drinking food in the faerie world will change you permanently, and so on. Another common theme in BtFFYE's fae world is the search for home. This is explicit in one of the choices you can make early on, but it's there in the other story branches, I think.

Despite the genre, this is not child's play. Dalmady includes multiple endings in BtFFYE, and none of them are happy endings. Some might say that as long as you meet the queen, you're pretty much set for disappointment, if you were ever expecting anything vaguely optimistic to come out of it. It made sense, though, because it was in line with the idea of faerie being duplicitous, of being all about glamour and trickery. Some of the endings are brutal, visceral; others are bittersweet.

A technical note: the link text jumps around every time I get to a new page when playing on Chrome, but this resolves when I put the browser on 90% view. Or switch browser.