The Shape You Make When You Want Your Bones To Be Closest to the Surface

University of Chicago Videogame Studies 2018
Closest employs hypertext to link Porpentine’s autobiographical remembrances of a horrifically abusive childhood and still tormented early adulthood, photos of pages from her dream journal, mini rpg platformers, musings on the potential of the internet and her own use of hypertext, and dystopian visions of a cybernetic world careening towards heat death.
See the full review

Punctum Books
“Language Is for Fucking Idiots”: On Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Like many of Porpentine’s text-games, the shape you make is preoccupied with world creation, the obliquities of self-narration in fidelity to the trauma that prohibits it, and generic cultural form, the satirical manipulation of which this author has mastered like perhaps no other writer working today. Her games are a new kind of psychic pointillism, a constantly decomposing mental breakdown in text-format, dispersed like solar dust into the pixelated debris. I know of no one who has done more in obsessively re-imagining the formal uses of the web browser in levering open the shut-up, wounded, online head.
See the full review