We Are the Firewall

by Anya Johanna DeNiro profile

dystopia
2013

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Number of Reviews: 3
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A surreal, branching Twine game with a lot of timed features, September 13, 2021
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

This is a very long Twine game from early on in the history of the medium.

Anya DeNiro has a long history of making games exploring non-human or surreal viewpoints and the interface between reality and virtual reality.

This game uses features like text that shifts and disappears on a timer and other, normal twine features like cycling text and text-replaces.

The story is hard to grasp, especially as I play it late at night. In my first playthrough, I thought there was no story, just a mishmash of words and metaphors. But as I played through all 12 branches and found the ending, I realized that there were several stories, including human trafficking, artifical intelligences, a bloody edutainment math game whose players were a victim in a cyber terrorist attack.

I felt as if I grasped less than half the overall story, but it was an interesting and thoughtful combination. There is a long history of very long, surreal twine games by trans authors that straddle the boundary between reality and virtual reality (Porpentine, Phantom Williams, Furkle, etc.) If you like this genre, this will be a good addition.

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