NYX

I played this game a while ago and figured I might as well write something for the review-a-thon event. For me it's hard to really rate and review most Neo Twiny games, since they have a 500 word limit, so usually you can't say too much on the game itself without going into tangents and eventually rambling on for paragraphs about nothing relevant in particular. I might do some of that.

I liked this game. Somewhere the author said they liked Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, a book I also really like, and I found myself thinking about Annihilation while playing. Mostly for the flavor of eldritch horror. In Annihilation, a team of scientists travel into a wilderness overtaken by an eldritch force, lush with strange and winderful lifeforms; here, the entity that accosts the protagonist's spacecraft is described as "beautiful and terrible and surreal". The key is that in both stories, the horror isn't horrific at all but more something unknown, difficult to understand, totally outside the landscape of human knowledge. To understand it would be to cease being human. That kind of deal.

But there seems to be no actual malice on the entity's part. It doesn't rip people apart or anything. Of the deaths it causes in this story, two are from suicide and two are from crew members fighting over whether they should let it in. (Spoiler - click to show)This is actually what you do in one of the game's three endings: you open the door to let that thing in, whatever it is, and the story ends with the understanding that the protagonist will never see Earth again.

There are two other endings, but that last one is my favorite. I guess it's a flavor of story I like. It's the whole leap of faith thing, accepting the unknown. To me, the story is about acceptance. The beauty of reaching out to the thing that's destroyed you, because you need to understand. Alien connection. Humanity's ultimate insignificance in the universe. Ascension in a way that involves losing everything, but you do it because you're compelled to make contact with a higher form of existence. Or something like that. I could go on.

I don't know how much of that is implicit in the game and how much is just me reading stuff I like into what's a pretty short story, all things considered. In Annihilation, people don't really die. They're transformed. It could be the same here, too, or maybe the ending where you let it in just ends with an unceremonious death for the protagonist as she's instantly killed. Hard to say. But anyway, cool stuff.

I also have to mention the great CSS. Minimalistic but hits all the right notes.

Playtime: ~5 min