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Review
This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.
The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.
The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.
Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.
I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.
