A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric

This is a neat idea I hadn't seen before this competition: an interactive comic strip.

It's four panels, each of which remains fixed with the same general background while a character moves between them.

The story itself is that you're an off-duty or retired cop who's trying to uncover a gun shipment. You need to find a way to break into a truck and uncover the truth.

The concept is pretty neat. The game is pretty hard! To fully get it right, you need to replay the same short sequence over and over, getting a little better at it each time. It's hard to guess what effects actions will be ahead of time, so experimentation is a must.

I tried some of the other linked comics, and the idea definitely seems fun. I'd play more games like this in the future (hopefully a bit easier for my own sake!)

Even though The Copyright of Silence was punishingly difficult and I never actually completed it successfully, I have a lot of fondness for it, so I was happy to see that the author was back with another (much smaller) optimization/replay-based Twine game with an unusual visual design.

In this one, you play as a detective trying to intercept a black-market weapons shipment being transported by a young man who thinks the world revolves around him. Progressing in the game largely entails figuring out how to exploit your quarry’s idiosyncratic reactions to his environment.

I enjoyed the process of replaying and making incremental progress, and was able to finish the game in this case. Getting the timing right was fiddly but didn’t seem too unfair. However, this is a small slice of a larger story and I haven’t played the other installments in this series, and I was kind of fuzzy on what the larger situation was and how the PC was involved in it (as he appears to be acting in a less-than-official capacity here). For a game that’s not really going for emotional punch or complex characterization, that’s less of an issue than it could be as long as it doesn’t impinge on the player’s ability to figure out the puzzles, which I didn’t think it did in this case, but it was a little bit distracting.