Starfish and Crystallisation

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 30m, two playthroughs

This is a melancholy tale of a (queer? maybe? not explicit but possibly implicit?) person hearing a familiar name linked to an air disaster, then having dreamlike memories of their time with them. Its vocabulary and design are quite wide of my sweet spot, venturing in both form and text into poetic verse. This is a style choice that often leaves me cold. To the work’s credit, its graphical and sound design were very evocative and convinced me to at least try to shed my baggage. It really raised the level of difficulty for me in a few ways though, seeming to actively pit its interface against any attempt to meet it on its own terms.

For one, when its really beautiful dreamstate backgrounds kick in, the text nearly vanishes due to unfortunate font color choice. For many screens, I had to highlight nearly the whole thing just to read it. It also uses a pane paradigm, where the presentation is a small pane, mid window (depending on how big your window is). The pane is not always visible, sometimes it is the same color as the rest of the window. Meaning text that needs scrolling to read gives no indication that scrolling is even possible! Early on, I nearly quit thinking there was a bug that masked a missing progress link, only to finally realize I needed to scroll an invisible pane to find it.

This was exacerbated by ANOTHER choice on some screens to only provide exit links after some “dramatic” delay, again leading me to believe I had stumbled into a bug when instead the game was toying with me, watching me jitterbug the pane until it deigned to allow me to move on. These technical issues were so consistently present, so consistently interrupting my experience, that I never really developed opportunity to accommodate to the poetic style of the prose. Again, I grant you that I probably need more centering than most to get into the flow of this kind of thing, so for me it was particularly defeating.

Here is the metaphor that came to me: I’m some, I dunno, post-war steel worker ok? I come home from a long day… steeling… and my young wife has decided we should get into yoga! Now, I can think of nothing I want less than to NOT get a beer and a shower, but since I love my wife, I gamely put down my lunch pail, take off my hardhat and kneel on the mat she lovingly laid out for me. Yeah, it was tough day riveting or whatever, but I force myself to try relaxing. I’m breathing and ohm’ing.. its a whole thing but by cracky I’m really trying. Then before I even get a fighting chance, the damn dog starts barking and barking and barking and won’t stop. As much as I love my wife, at some point, can’t we agree the dog is telling us to try again later and I just get the beer?

What, doesn’t everyone jump to full-narrative metaphor?

The game’s narrative took a curious turn at one point. For most of its buildup, it seemed to leave its present-grounding behind and vacillate between ‘real’ and dream memories. It had a solid enough throughline until… maybe 3/4s in it took a turn in specificity that both rejected the inputs it let me make prior, and introduced specificity that was jarringly.. not unrelated, but read like a second anecdote that shared resonances with the first. Like two friends telling different stories that had enough similarities that made them worth sharing. This effect was cemented by a closing screen that seemed to reference an entirely DIFFERENT work called Echoes and Traces. Like I had started one work and at some point it transitioned to a resonant but entirely different work.

Like my steelworker finally got the dog to shut up, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, his wife had gently seated a dozen acupuncture needles in him. C’mon doll, am I ever getting that beer?

That was actually kind of a cool effect, honestly. I just wish the work hadn’t been fighting me the whole time and I could have appreciated the ride and sly closing subversion more.

Horror Icon: Babadook
Vibe: Meditation interrupted
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would toss a coin. Heads, I would rework the view pane paradigm: give clear indications when scrolling was needed and eliminate the timed text additions of links. Tails, I would think about fixing the font color to better contrast against the background, but then probably flip the coin again.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025.

This is a very vibes-based piece; I got a strong sense of emotion from it, and feel it was successful on that front. However, I never fully understood the chronology or the details of what was going on. Past and present melded together, slipping back and forth between the two; characters blended together, leaving me uncertain exactly how many lost loves the protagonist had to mourn. Possibly this ambiguity was intentional, but I would have preferred a little more concreteness. As other reviewers have mentioned, I also struggled with the lack of contrast between the text and the background images.

Our tale takes place in sunny Singapore. This is a story of loss and longing, with elements of dreaming, introspection and memory as the protagonist thinks over something they have lost. There are a few riddles at the start which ties into the protagonist's own train of thought, but most of these should be solvable either with google search or the hints provided in game.

That said, along with A Bottle from the Future, the presentation is hard on the eyes. The choice of colors, along with the sound, do a good job of conveying the melancholy vibes. Yet, it is just plain difficult to read. The choice of red and pale fonts do not look quite readable against the blue and white backgrounds, and the tiny size of the fonts does not help at all. As someone who has made his own bad art, I understand how difficult it can be to get this color contrast right. There was also one time where I quit the game early as I was just unable to see the link to continue.

The story was nice and the pictures fit the vibe. I just think that larger font against a solid background might have helped with readability.

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 24 April 2025.

This is a short multimedia Twine piece about past memories and loss.

It’s quite evocative, and well written, though not too interactive. There are some key choices to make, and also some sections where you’re asked to type an answer or word into a box. Which can be challenging, though hints are given.

There is music, but fortunately for me it was instrumental, so unusually for me I kept playing it while I read the text. Often audio tracks for multimedia IF distract me too much from reading. The visuals got a little muddled at times, making text harder to read. But generally the interface was pretty clean.

A short piece, but well worth playing through. It only took 10 minutes of my time, but I found it very engrossing.