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.