NYX

I count at least two layers of metatextual irony in Nyx’s second sentence:

"Scientists, soldiers, pilots, people of few words — why didn’t we send painters, writers, musicians, why didn’t we send anyone capable of humanity?"

The first layer, of course, is that this is a work of IF, an art form pioneered by programmers, mathematicians, physicists, and many other scientists who proved themselves more than capable of humanity (and, as to at least some of them, less-than-capable at shutting up). The second layer is that this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, so a person of few words is actually the ideal narrator.

Given the brevity of the format, it makes sense that the game unabashedly tips its hand to what it’s riffing off; the opening is a clear response to the “they should have sent a poet” bit from Contact, and the situation – the narrator is the last one left after a space monster has killed all the other crew on their ship – is structurally the same as Alien, though there are some important differences in the details. It’s a neat juxtaposition, since the former is all about the wonder of exploration while the latter turns space into a site of terror. The prose, as always with this author’s work, edges on the sublime, and is more than capable of holding these opposites simultaneously:

"Why me? 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?"

The story is also well-chosen for the length limit, since relaying how the other crew-members died in a sentence or two apiece is effectively chilling, and conveys all that’s really needed; there are fuzzy indications that the alien does more than just eviscerate people and perhaps exerts some degree of psychic influence, but of course the narrator wouldn’t have a clear sense of how that works, as this is apparently humanity’s first contact with any sort of extraterrestrial life. And this simple setup is more than enough to provide context to the game’s one, climactic choice – whether to send the ship into deep space and hope it stays lost, set coordinates back to earth so that others will encounter the alien, or open the bulkhead door and embrace what’s coming.

Narratively speaking all of these are reasonable endings to the first 2/3 of the game, but my one critique of Nyx is that I didn’t feel like there was as much thematic connection between the opening – which, per the bits I’ve quoted, is heavily devoted to the inadequacies the narrator feels about trying to use words to capture their experiences in space – and two of the endings; each of these individual pieces are quite well written, don’t get me wrong, but for a game this short I wanted the experience to feel tighter. It took until the last ending that I tried to see the build-up actually pay off – which it did, quite well. But as a result I think this is a work of IF that suffers somewhat from its interactivity; I was sufficiently engaged by the presentation, in stark black and reds with clicking required to get the next bit of tense, evocative text, that I didn’t feel like I really needed any narrative agency. And as a work of dynamic fiction that ensured the player sees the parts of the story in the order that would have the most impact, I think Nyx could be even more successful – though I think it certainly works well enough as it is.