High Jinnks

So this game has you play as an ancient jinn trying to get back some cash from a hustler.

This is a pretty long Twine game, with interesting styling and good sentence-by-sentence writing and also excellent worldbuilding. It also features romance of several kinds and stories within stories.

I found the story and the interactivity fairly good, but I feel like they could go further. There are different layers to games: if they're buggy or full of typos, nothing else really matters, the game's just too weird to play. If it's not buggy but the interactivity is really frustrating or the text is boring, then it just makes you want to stop.

This game clears all of those hurdles (which is a real feat in and of itself), but I think it misses the last one, which consists of things like emotional depth and compelling gameplay.

The characterization of the player and NPCs are all over the place. Sometimes we want to murder everyone, sometimes we're lonely. Sometimes we want things for years, and then a second later we don't. Our main ally goes from assertive to passive to aggressive to loving.

And the interactivity often seems like 'Do things this way or do things the same way but with different phrasing'. I feel like it missed some chances to let you consistently characterize yourself or provide long-lasting effects. There are some choices to do such things though (I especially enjoyed [spoiler]the effects of buying a leopard-print shirt.[/spoiler] )

I think this is a good game, but I think this author is capable of making an entirely awesome game, and that's why I pointed out those specific things. Your mileage may vary!

+Polish: No bugs in my playthrough, nice styling
+Descriptiveness: Writing was vivid and funny.
-Interactivity: I felt like the choices weren't very effective.
-Emotional impact: I couldn't get a read on people's motivations and characteristics.
+Would I play again? Yes, this game was pretty fun!