sojourn

I opened and played this brief twine game for the Short Game Showcase for 2024.

It was written in less than 500 words. It is laid out as a web of nodes, making it highly non-linear. The wording is intentionally rich and requires careful reading.

It has a nice background image and overall impressive styling. I didn't like how small the words were, and was going to complain in this review, but then I found the settings option and it changes that, so I thought that was really thoughtful and shows how much work went into this game.

The words in the game made me think of nature a lot. While there are many themes in the poem, the highlighted words tend to revolve around weather, plants, and time, so I thought a lot about the progression of time and of life. It was nice.

sojourn is a micro interactive story, with a very intriguing way of formatting its text. Rather than having a clear beginning or end, the game lets you interact with the different links to display further text, but never more than two blocks at a time. All the paragraphs are connected with one another through these links, and you must cycle through different block to be able to read everything.

As for the delectable prose, it is really “a love letter to many things” as the blurb informs us. At time melancholic, serious, mathematical, musical, or even cheesy, the different little paragraph describe the things that the author holds dear to their heart. It’s delightful, and I was gushing all the way through reading it!