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.

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.

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.