Forward

Forward is a short personal interactive piece made in Twine, about life. Worries and hopes, anxiety and assurance, failures and successes... the good and the bad of realities. Set as a meditation exercise, the prose weaves bits of memories of the past together, with sources of tensions and triumphs mirroring each other, showing both states will coexist, moving from one to the other, moving one with the other.

Setting aside the specific samples of situations, this is still an emotional piece hitting on those universal feelings of not being enough, of being lost and hopeless, of struggling with what is around us. And yet it still gives us a glimmer of hope, forcing us to think about the good things around us, of the achievements accomplished, how we grew and moved further than the struggles.

It is a good exercise to do.

I generally like Bez’s work, as my view on creative writing is that it’s a way to share parts of our experiences and feelings with others, and Bez’s work is generally very effective at communicating how they feel.

This is a shorter game, drawing on some of the cozier seeds. It uses a warm color palette and a background sound of (I think) a fire crackling.

It has you sitting and thinking about all the bad things in your life, picking over the negative thoughts with a fine tooth comb. I remember playing it for the first time, feeling like it was going to be a downer game, but then I was pleasantly surprised to see things turned on their heads.

Overall, a good game and one that had a positive impact on me. I do think I slightly prefer Bez’s longer games, but that’s about it.

But maybe you just need to remember the past.

Honestly, the first thing I can say is quite clear. I could picture everything. Now normally, I have bad image creation in my head (can’t conjure up images or sounds or feelings etc., much less memories). But this one had very very simple descriptions, that conveyed the feeling very well. I could picture the curtain, and the bed. The voice felt familiar, even though I’ve only ever heard a meditation voice guide once in my life. But this displayed it with minimal words. Which is amazing, to be honest.

Other than that, I could understand what the person was going through (despite, because of age and limited experiences, never having gone through something even vaguely familiar). Which means a lot to me.

I was a bit sad that it ended so quickly, considering it was such an evocative and great experience. I can’t quite give it the as high as I want to give it, because there simply isn’t enough to rate, and it felt like at some point, I knew it wouldn’t go there.