SOL

This Twine game entered in the Neo Twiny Jam is, like the others, under 500 words.

It uses a pleasing text effect where hovering over underlined words brings up a box with clarification, like words muttered under the breath or mental comments reviewing your own previous thoughts.

I at first thought this was just going to be some edgy stoner thing (as it starts with you passing a joint back and forth with a friend) but it's a lot more meaningful, with a deep science conversation about the sun and a link between that and the situation going on around you that is full of implication but not brought into the open.

The ending is powerful in its own way, but it didn't completely land for me, as I felt like it was slightly disconnected from the rest of the game. Kind of like a differentiable piecewise function that has a discontinuous second derivative; the transition is fairly smooth at the break point but something feels slightly off. But the writing is great, some of the best I've seen in the jam so far.

On the surface, SOL is a prose poem of a benign conversation between friends about the sun, as they partake in sharing a joint on a summer evening, with the writing moving from concrete description to what could be interpreted as hallucinations. But, below, hiding under a mouseover macro, is hidden a secret message, unsaid words, repressed feelings. The descriptions of movements and bodies balance between a loving gaze to an almost obsessive and carnal survey through the narrator’s eyes. The writing is intoxicating…