NYX

NYX is a short sci-fi horror Twine piece, where Astronaut Christina Kennedy sends her final transmission aboard NYX-V, following first alien contact gone… not so much according to plan. Through the distressing transmission, you learn of the terminal fate of the rest of the crew, the fate of humanity in the shaky hands of this last survivor. It is crushing, seeing lively crews with hopes and dreams, the little left of their past humanity turned into a single bloody mention, seeing the last survivor struggle with the course of action when all seems lost and hopeless. Now the entity is banging at her door.

There is a choice, of course, for Kennedy to do with her last moment, and how to handle the entity. Between leaving a thread of hope or sending humanity into a destructive course, each option is just… ugh, impeccable.

I really really liked the opening of the entry. It reminded me of those sci-fi novels where large ship would travel the heavens to settle colonies on other planets, always mentioning the engineers and the pilots and so on, with the more “culturally” focused characters being look down upon. The fixation that art and humanity have little to do with exploration and advancement… until something goes horribly wrong.

Anyways, it’s great. Short horror sci-fi story hitting all the marks.

NYX, a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, takes on the largest of topics–humanity itself–in the smallest number of words: 496. It condenses a sense of vastness, of space and time, into just a few moments. The first person narration feels intimate; the framing (as a final transmission from a doomed space capsule) feels remote. The game vacillates between those conceptual antipodes in a way that feels shimmery and almost playful. This play even occurs on the level of the language itself, in the modulation between longer, layered sentences (“Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut's — dear God, please don't let me fuck this up — why me when there's something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?”), and short, direct ones (“I am the only one left.”).

The only choice in the game comes at the very end, when you decide (Spoiler - click to show)whether you will let your spacecraft return to earth with an alien species on board or whether you will draw the danger away from earth by letting the spacecraft drift. If I had a small criticism it would be that (Spoiler - click to show)letting the spacecraft drift and letting the entity in didn’t feel all that differentiated as choices, because (Spoiler - click to show)it seemed as though the entity had already been inside the spacecraft, and if not, it was on the verge of breaking in anyway. But overall NYX understands that the particulars of the hostile entity are not as important as how the humans react to it. “Beautiful and terrible and surreal” is all we need to know. It could be a plague or it could be an epiphany. You could even substitute “the unknown,” “uncertainty,” or “lack of control” for whatever is outside the spacecraft. The game would be just as meaningful, because the alien species was never terribly important; NYX was always about the humans.

The premise of NYX is one that many science fiction and horror fans have heard over the years: the cosmic horror has taken over, and the humans must respond to this otherworldly threat. While writers and artists will fixate on the details and how they differ, the real point of divergence is the nature of the human response. How should humans retaliate or negotiate with the alien? Do they succeed or fail?

NYX describes itself as "the final transmission of the ESPM-05 (NYX-V) crew on their final spaceflight". No other context provides any information about what actually happened. Instead, we hear lamentations: the narrator cries that they are not a poet and that their astronaut vocabulary cannot condense the spiritual exhilaration of oxygen and the otherworldly being into prose. Yet, they believe they can make a "final stand, gazing nobly unto the abyss". The narrator can only make choices that lead to three different outcomes.

The game ends, the consequences of the player's choice left untold and only speculated upon by the mind.

There is much to delight in: the minimalist aesthetics, the wide possibility space the game offers with three simple choices, and the intense fear that no choice is perfect and the being will find ways to overcome the setback.

But what I found magical is that there are three potential stories in NYX. Each choice could create a story with its own specific theme, different from the other two, and highlight the player character's lingering dreams and fears before their last breath.

When we put the three choices together, we see a spectrum of what human beings can be when facing the unknown. They are almost like blank slates until that moment, when they see an Other and form a response that "humanizes" themselves. Their actions and inactions, the final stands if you will, create the human in these kinds of science fiction stories.

Rather than settle for a short story with one theme and one theme only, NYX lays the groundwork for many short stories to come, suggesting that there are many ways to define what it means to be human in a first contact story. It allows the player to evoke the human as a wide range of possibilities and to imagine what humans can be, making it a richer and deeper story upon reflection.

There is value in short stories that seem to provide a canvas for the reader to think about the constellation of meanings and ideas out there. We have so many conflicting ideas about what the human condition is that it's worth finding a place to think about what that means. NYX is one such canvas: it shows how human beings are so malleable and indeterminate until that single mouse click, and I'm very grateful to have discovered this little sweet piece.