NYX

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.