The Moon's Knight

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.

Is there a pun in English more groan-inducing than knight/night? That obvious, superficially rich but in reality kind of banal equation is understandably catnip for wannabe poets[1], as well as the Marvel comics writers responsible for the character whose name makes me do a double-take when reading this game’s title. But the thing is, a person in armor, and feudal relationship with a liege, really bears very little resemblance to the dark time of day, even though each of those things is awesome on its own – the pun is just wordplay, it’s not really saying anything.

What the Moon’s Knight presupposes is, maybe it is? This Neo-Twiny Jam entry makes one of the cannier moves for dealing with the 500-word limit by leaning hard into poetry, personifying the moon and mythologizing the knight so that the two can fit in the same frame. They’re not on the same level, though: that possessive clearly indicates that the moon is the one wielding gravitational influence over her knight. The knight is the more relatable figure (the game’s one choice focuses on them) and the conflict they face is with a terrestrial army, but that outer combat is only a pale echo of the angst they experience from daring to be the moon’s lover.

The plot is heavily bottom-lined, in order to spend scarce word-count on evocative imagery – there’s an implication that the knight seeks out battle because when arrows blot out the sun, that darkness might bring out the moon even during the day, which is both more romantic and more bad-ass than the line from Herodotus that inspired it. The prose throughout cleaves to this lyrical, heavy-metal vibe:

"Morning - Death - lies beyond the ridge-border. Atop it, the Moon caresses your cheek longingly."

For all that the setup, conflict, choice, and payoff are necessarily condensed, there’s still room
for specificity in the details – I especially liked the ampoule of starlight the knight wears at their throat. And it’s hard not to feel invested in a doomed love that’s bound to end in tragedy no matter what, either the knight or the moon inevitably weeping over their misfortune at the finish. While I’m not sure the game fully sold me on how the corporeal battle that’s the subject of the plot relates to the emotional tug-of-war between the two main characters, I can’t deny the drama and poetry here on display: the moon is awesome, knights are awesome, both together are awesome.

[1] This is a digression so long and discursive that even I couldn’t figure out how to cram it into the intro, but since this is a relatively short review I’ll allow myself a footnote to explicate it: the secret origin of my dislike of the knight/night pun goes back to Jewel, a notably successful singer-songwriter of the mid-90s Alternative scene. She was a great performer with a bunch of songs I enjoy to this day, but her lyrics, standing on their own, were enough to make you contemplate the inevitable heat-death of the universe with barely-repressed yearning. I’m spoiled for choice, but “You’ll be Henry Miller/and I’ll be Anais Nin/but this time it’ll be even better/we’ll stay together in the end” was a standout, because 1) I guess toxic narcissists deserve each other, but good Lord, in what universe would that be “better”? and 2) the meter, oh, oh, the meter. Anyway she released a book of poetry alongside her second album, it was called “A Night Without Armor”, I can still remember perusing it out of morbid curiosity in a Long Island Barnes and Noble and almost swooning.

The Moon's Knight is a very short Twine game (under 500 words, as per the rules for the game jam in which it was made for). As such, it's a very quick experience, taking no more than 5 minutes to play through both of the two paths. I was impressed by how much it managed to do in those 500 words, but it did fall short for me personally -- it was less impactful than I would have hoped.

The prose is actually very interesting. I won't lie, when I booted up the game and read the first passage, I got tripped up on quite a bit of it. I'm one who very much dislikes ambiguity and confusion in prose -- leave that to poetry, is my view on it...

So when I read phrases like (Spoiler - click to show)"dark-crowned wilds" and "oceans traversed by starlight" and "breeze-born interlocutors" -- phrases which, in my view, had no literal meaning and rather were just kinda meant to invoke vibes -- I wasn't really digging it. I just prefer to always know what is literally happening in the story, rather than simply the emotions/moods the author is attempting to convey. However, as I read on, the prose did grow on me, and I realized that this author's version of "prose poetry" was actually a lot better done than some other things I've read recently. Quite frankly, this is what the whole Twine reads like (and probably is): prose poetry. Well, the author couldn't have picked a better Twine for prose poetry than a 500-word one. What can become grating through long exposure is often much more effective and enjoyable in short bites.

And once I got into it, I did find the prose itself enjoyable. I think the language is actually fresh enough and the author's command of imagery skillful enough that the whole comes together in a quite pleasing way. Even if I didn't actually literally know what was happening all of the time, the words coalesced together in my mind, becoming more than the sum of their parts. There was genuine emotion in the prose, and with a deft hand, it evoked those same emotions in me. The odd, serpentine sentence structures also had an impact: they got my mind to let go of my pre-conceived notions of what prose should like, and instead enjoy the words for what they were.

However, I really would have preferred to still know the literal meaning of what was happening -- and despite all the evocative imagery and sculptured sentences, I just wasn't sure what happened in this Twine. I know (Spoiler - click to show)there's a war between the Sun and the Moon, and I'm a knight for the Moon, and so I fight in a battle... but after that, it gets very, very hazy. (Spoiler - click to show) Was the only choice in the game a choice on whether to sabotage my own side, or not? Or was it more of a choice on whether to give up and let myself die because I didn't want to go on anymore? If I raised my shield, what was the Moon doing at the end, what did she mean she will uphold my promise herself? As in, like... she's going to sacrifice herself to win the war...? Or, uh... she's going to take my sword and use it to defeat the Sun herself? I honestly had no idea which of these options was the right one, or if any of them were.

Maybe it was just me (and my lack of experience reading and appreciating poetry), but I really could not understand what was happening or what the actual impact of my choices were. And so, it was difficult for me to connect emotionally to this game.

But I have to acknowledge that it must be really, really difficult to tell a full and complete story in only 500 words. And what did make it into these 500 words is well-done and enjoyable, if only for the sake of enjoying beautiful language alone. So maybe not my favorite, but I definitely think it's a worthwhile game to play if you like poetry or prose poetry at all.

P.S. My favorite line in the game: (Spoiler - click to show) "Dancing flames illume a lonely moon." Lovely little line, and well-chosen as the first link the player can click on.