The Moon's Knight

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/14/25
Playtime: 5m, two playthroughs, all 497 words

Another in my "Penny Pinching Parity" review sub-series. Microgame jams are a practically review-proof endeavor. If we take the reviewer’s task to its most transactional core, the question at play is ‘Is it worth a player’s time?’ Of course this question is nuanced. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is so heavily steeped in the reviewer’s biases and fascinations that without context it is practically useless.

So we try to build context, frame our reactions. Readers can ideally extrapolate their own response based on this, either in sympathy or opposition. Y’know what that takes though? Words, man, lots of words. So.. at what point does the review become out of scale to its subject?

In service of a sub-500 word game? I’m not sure I can decide on a MOVIE to watch in fewer than 500 words, let alone capture complicated feelings from art! And for these short works, length matters. Investing in gameplay for multiple hours, to be underwhelmed is opportunity cost frittered away from other things you COULD be enjoying more. Investing in review reading is time you could instead be playing the game in question! I mean, I’m pushing half this game’s word budget, and haven’t said a damn thing about it yet!

Let’s just posit that 5 minute art IS worth your time. You will waste far more than that on far less rewarding elements of your day. Like reading these reviews.

Of, say, The Moon’s Knight! Art thrives under constraint, and MK is no exception. Every word is crucially important, and must cover multiple bases: mood, character, plot, scene. This is actually true of all writing, but the clarity of hard limits drives it home. I am an unabashed fan of this author’s prose. Their longer works cast a spell on me through the power of carefully crafted, moody sentences. It is a fair question, if I pretend I don’t know the answer, whether shorter works would clip these wings too short to fly. Well, no, not at all. MK makes the perfect decision to tightly constrain narrative focus - a study of a mythic, doomed romance set against a backdrop of brutal warfare.

Ok, writing it out like that doesn’t sound clipped, nor does it feel so in the moment. We are treated to visceral yet lyric passages that feel exactly as elaborate as needed to weave this particular tale’s spell. There is no sense of pushing against an arbitrary boundary, only the incredible sharpness of it. The discipline comes in what to leave out: backstory that is more powerfully inferred anyway; rounded character traits that are immaterial to the central conflict; world building that is so much chrome. Jettisoned or gestured at without belabored fanfare. This is a focused work that lets its prose breathe where it needs to, and does not waste time where it does not.

Do yourself a favor. Spend the 5 minutes. (497!)

This is a pretty short twine game with about 2-3 screens.

It uses a lot of imagery in a way that it was hard to know what's going on. There is a great battle, and a promise to come back from a fight. There's a woman you love, and there's the moon, and they might be the same?

It's very hard to tell. It's clear the author felt some strong emotion while writing this, and while I can't discern their intended message or atmosphere, I can be grateful for the author communicating their feeling to me.

Like other 30x30 games this has really small text with a settings option to make the text larger.

Making a satisfying piece of IF in under 500 words is hard. Though I’m a vocal short-fiction aficionado, I find a lot of Neo-Twiny Jam works miss the mark for me; they often tackle concepts that are too big for the word count to handle in a way that feels complete, especially if there’s branching.

The Moon’s Knight deals with this by zooming in on a single moment in a toxic relationship, a moment when one lover chooses whether to trust the other or not. It lets poetic language and a sort of allegorical approach (the fickle beloved is literally the Moon) carry the emotional weight instead of trying to establish two realistic, well-rounded characters and sell the player on caring about them in so short a time, which I think is a good move. The language is rhythmic and alliteration-focused, which, in combination with the subject matter of knights riding into battle, is strongly reminiscent of Old English/Middle English poetry. I mention this because I enjoy that kind of thing, but also because it suggests we’re also drawing on the medieval framework of courtly love here, with its treatment of a knight longing for an unattainable lady and laying down their life for her as an ideal to be aspired to. (The Moon’s Knight takes a darker view of this, of course.)

My only criticism is that I feel the import of the game’s one choice isn’t particularly clear before you make it, depriving me as the player of the ability to feel a faint echo of the player character’s agony at deciding whether to risk her life to trust a lover who has been known to be inconstant, or whether to blatantly demonstrate her distrust. Instead my feeling on the first go-round was “I guess I’ll just pick something and see what happens?” which seems like perhaps not what the piece is aiming for. Making it clearer ahead of the choice that the Moon has promised the knight her protection (probably when first mentioning/describing the ampoule?) would have given the choice more impact the first time for me.

But other than that, it’s a striking piece that does a good job of making its emotional point in an economical number of words.