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Number of Reviews: 4
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1-4 of 42 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Theatre of the Mind, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: 30min
Depending on how you approach it, this one either packs a lot into its short runtime, or not enough. It’s a Monster of the Week kind of setup, an in media res supernatural investigation with personal stakes. It’s also very linear, very few choices to make and most of those adding details without changing anything. For sure, the narrative is the star here, not the game play.
To the narrative’s benefit, the writing style is smooth and confident, and plays with itself in fun ways. At various times it subverts itself with humor, and elsewhere falls victim to the powers of the monsters it is documenting. The latter in particular is a really fun tweaking of form that works better in IF than it might on the page. All in all, the writing style is a solid foundation to support the story.
But the writing’s biggest strength I think also ends up ham stringing it. The narrative leans a lot on implied back story, loric details tossed out without much explication, leaving the reader to speculate/fill in the gaps. It is a powerful technique, and the details dispensed are singular, odd, evocative and intriguing. (Spoiler - click to show)Rainwater Death filters, reality bending creatures, god shards, there is a lot to tantalize, but because it’s new to you but not the characters you only get oblique hints. It really engages the reader’s imagination.
Unfortunately, the same remove that makes the backstory so tantalizing is also applied to the main character and their relationships. This works less effectively, and makes the protagonist a bit of a blank. Interesting things are happening to and around them, but they remain enigmatic at the center of it. There are relationships presented as fact, but without details that showcase the emotional underpinnings that have to be there. While the reader’s imagination is fully engaged in theorizing the setting’s details, it’s quite a different thing to ask us to ALSO plumb the main character’s personality and emotional history. Most especially because of the personal stakes in the plot.
As the story drew to an end, the most overpowering impression I had was that I had just read an outline, rather than a fully fleshed out story. A really intriguing outline, with details I’d love to hear more about, but needing a lot more meat on its bones.
Spice Girl: Scary/Ginger Spice
Vibe: Horror Outline
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would focus on fleshing out the protagonist’s character. Let the reader see more of their inner life, either through dialogue, actions or direct access to thoughts (a bit easier to do in IF). Most especially the two relationships that are at the heart of the story. The plot and background can get away with leveraging the reader’s imagination. The protagonist and their emotional life is going to be more powerful delivered on the page.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
End of the world and family drama combo Twine piece, May 16, 2023This is a short - but not too short - Twine piece of the end of the world and family relations. I expected it to be shorter than it was, when the author said they’d had to cut it short due to Covid. But it’s a good length. The big downside for me was the general lack of interactivity. Often there would be big chunks of text and then just one link to click, so not really a choice. Though it got a bit more branching in places, and during some NPC interactions.
If I was to make a suggestion to the author it would be to think of ways to increase the interactivity. Because as a reader I want a sense of agency. I liked exploring in the house, even if in practice it was just effectively ticking off a bunch of options.
I did like the use of flashbacks, as you go back into your past life and relive events, which shed light on the present. That was nicely handled, and added depth to the story.
But it needed more interaction. But a promising piece. I got one ending, but didn’t reply, because I’d have had to back to the start. I noted quite a few typos. But it was intriguing.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An undead hybrid tries to kill their mother, May 15, 2023This game is heavily centered on world-building. It's a Twine game and it's focused on you, a person who is not quite alive and not quite dead, who has to stop your mom from destroying the world.
The main attractions here are the characters and world-building. This definitely seems like a setting and a group of people the author has spent a great deal of time thinking about, from the murder-happy girlfriend to the html-breaking Ataxia monsters to the mother figure herself. All of them seem well developed and polished.
I think what's in this game is solid (nice use of text manipulation, too), but I'd love more chance to explore the world and see more of these concepts in play. I guess I'd either prefer a tighter focus with the current level of interactivity or the bigger story with the wider exploration.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Spring Thing 2023: The Withering Gaze of the Earth, May 7, 2023The Withering Gaze of the Earth wastes no time leaping for the gothic. You wander ashore a strange island as the ship the brought you here recedes, leaving you to explore an abandoned house: “You carefully climb the stairs, slippery from the rain. There was a railing here once, but its been broken by a fallen tree limb. The windows of the house are almost all broken, blown out by the storm. The back door hangs ajar, the latch torn free from the frame.” The gothic, since Victorian ingenuity and a bit of bureaucratic recordkeeping first defeated Dracula, expands easily into occult tech, and The Withering Gaze of the Earth dutifully follows suit with evocative gadgets like an “ethereal radio” and an “ontological engine”, which grant the space an implied field of connectivity, which we monitor nervously through Geigeresque PPM as the anomalies intensify.
These aesthetic gestures don’t envelop the reader, however, because they’re kept at an arm’s length by a pervasive streak of flippancy. The narration isn’t immersed in the mood it’s creating, a cynical detachment resonant with the protagonist’s anger at the occult machinations of her mother. In perhaps the most telling example, the climactic confrontation with your mother as cosmic destroyer remanifesting in blood, which could be the moment the tropes apotheosize into gilded miniature, quickly dissolves into moooom you always do this bickering: ““What are you even doing? We can tell you’re trying to claw your way back into the world, and probably attain godhood, but…” / “Oh that’s simple, you’re correct about both,” your mother says. / “I mean that wasn’t really my question,” you say. “But you’re just going to be an unhelpful dick about it, aren’t you?” / “I’m sure you think that’s my greatest sin, not bending over backwards to cater to you.”” This gap between the notional material of the conversation and its emotive affect typifies much of the character’s relationships. Conversations are disjointed laconic, burbling quickly from ““I’m fine,” she said, wiping some more blood off her face. “And I didn’t murder anyone, either.”” to oh-yeah-and-also swerves like “Despite the circumstances in which we met, or, in many ways, perhaps because of them, we got married three months later.” Reader, first I spent about three hours in the shower trying to scrub the gore, then I married her.
This kind of disconnect can be a useful twist, building a parallel logic which suddenly moebiuses bizarre when you’re forced to reencounter it from an external perspective, a tactic with which The Withering Gaze of the Earth does feint, creating little air pockets of humanity in the horror extravagance: “Death calls to death, and I was only dead for a few days before a fragment of a dead god lodged itself in my heart, and I awoke screaming, with a maelstrom of blood as the fire of my rebirth” transitions starkly into “My family, of course, did not really want to be known as the family with a nightmarish creature as a daughter, and hurriedly sequestered me away from public life, while my mother poured herself into her research on how to fix me; subjecting me to numerous painful rites in an attempt to banish the thing I had become.” There’s a compelling pathos hinted here, one that sets up the mother’s antagonism while also providing a complicating nuance of her desperation to help her daughter with some unfathomable condition. Whether this heightens or cheapens the twist, that the mother actually caused the condition, depends on which way you’d rather pull the story, more into the mother/daughter angst or more horrorcore. The story can’t quite choose either, which is further alienated from the reader with its moue monotone: as reality breaks, causing text to crash across the screen, the tone goes for both the grandiose “The world writhes in pain” and the mundane “”Have I ever mentioned your mother is a huge asshole?”” Indeed, the game almost seems to undermine itself with a kind of disinvested contempt. The finale, escaping this pocket dimension as your mother collapses it in her rebirth ceremony, is handwaved away with a snort and eyeroll: the protagonist asks what just happened, and the reply is ““Uhhhh, based on your description, and the extremely high breach contaminants, I think the combination of her divine weight and the unraveling of reality broke open the barriers between worlds and like… You know how that sea you saw yourself on? Its what the death infused water here comes from, and I think that got pulled in and she just was destroyed by a deluge of the rain or whatever.”” Whatever indeed, whatever else?
Which is saddening, because when The Withering Gaze of the Earth cares about its imagery, it shimmers: “Behind you, a sigil of fire hovering over the bridge. It flickers and shifts between a dozen different forms in the span of a second. Rocks hover in the air around it, screaming of the endless wake for the rotting god. The abandoned car has sprouted roots that writhe upward into the sky.” The succinctness propels its vividness into a genuine urgency. With all the time jumps and exposition swipes pumping a techno beat, that urgency keeps your motivating condition raw and anxious: “Breath has been denied to you, since your death and rebirth. / Your body still kind of works like a living person, so you stop for a moment to see if you can get some of your energy back, but unfortunately the clawing music and the crushing weight on you only gets more intense when there isn’t the struggle to press onward to distract you, so you’re left with no choice but to struggle onward.” The pull to confront your mother, but also your own embodied conflictions, as well as the cosmic overtones whorling the whole thing into watercolor, creates some compelling thematic pulses, but alas, none of which the game seems eager to sustain.
On the Spring Thing page, the blurb admits the story was waylaid by Covid, ending up truncated and perhaps a bit first drafty. Certainly, there are many places where details run sparse, like our shotguns-out marriage or the lore of creatures like the ataxic sigilites. One wishes the author health and serenity, and perhaps in a better situation this story could be revised to fulfill the full colors of intention.
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