Sprinklepills!

I remember the author's name looking familiar, and then I realized they'd written a lot of IFDB reviews. I hadn't recalled them writing any works that could be reviewable on IFDB, so I was glad to see Neo Twiny Jam gave them an opportunity to be on the other side.

This is a short conversation where you head to a doomed sales pitch, which is doomed because of your social awkwardness and the uselessness of what you’re selling. It’s benevolent towards the poor confused protagonist (punching down would be easy but wrong) who may have visions of being someone who repurposes or synergizes (obligatory buzzword) two ideas that, well, are less than the sum of their parts. They think they have found something new. Perhaps the only reason it is or seems new is that everyone else who thought of it ignored it.

I may be reading too much into this, but the night before playing, I was reading yet another article about how everyone in America is fed that you need to be an entrepeneur to really make it, or entrepeneurs deserve a lot more than work drones, or do you really just want to be in a cubicle all your life without being able to order people around? Or wave stuff in front of people’s faces saying "You don’t know you want this, but really, you do," and then they fawn and say "Oh my goodness yes we always wanted this but never realized it?" You should have ambition! It keeps the economy running, and stuff!

The poor main character in this piece has ambition and persistence. It’s easy to poke holes in what they do. But I think of all the times I tried to combine two unrelated things together and failed, and I felt I deserved to make that connection, and I was pretty sure I had something new. I was never brave enough to go to a bunch of CEOs with my ideas. Maybe that was for the better.

Still, I want to try piecing things together and making connections, in my writing, even if I fail as badly as the Sprinklepills salesperson. It really captured a lot of the fears I would feel if I were in a job where I had to make a lot of cold calls. It even got me out of my chair and in a good enough mood to take care of some things that made much more sense than selling Sprinklepills.

In this brief Twine game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, you play as an inventor who is pitching their project, Sprinklepills!

The game is pretty short, with only an option or two, but presents a whole story from start to finish in a way many of the other jam entries fail to do.

I liked that the story could be read a few different ways; as stoic heroicism in the face of doubt (like The Pursuit of Happyness), as a goofball story of a whacky inventor, or as a deluded individual.

Overall, there's nothing wrong with this story, but I feel like it has a lot of features that could be dialed up. There's some good writing, but it has the potential for being great; the plot is interesting, but could be engaging, etc. So I look forward to future works from this author, but feel like this won't be their greatest work.

Exactly what it says on the tin, a invention without a purpose, and hence if you want to convince a investor, he has to be just as purposeless. The ones the story sets you up with are not. Silly you. You played to win.

Sprinkepills! is an absurd entry, where you are trying to sway investors to invest in your product: the Sprinklepills! or sprinkles for on the go. It is a very long shot - your product is not quite conventional - but you give it your all. You believe in it with all of your might, even if you do not always find the words to express yourself…
The desperation in the character has the meeting continues was a bit heartbreaking…
Still, this might be the most absurd business pitch I’ve ever encountered.