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Review
This is a short game (less than 15 minutes long) that takes its central idea from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to examine eating disorders.
What It Is
Like some other Twine games, The Goldilocks Principle plays with choice and limited options.
Apart from advancing passages in a mostly linear way, the player mainly decides how triggering an episode is, based on a scale marked 1 to 5.
(The game uses the word “triggering” to describe the scale. But more accurately, maybe, it’s a scale of viscerality, since not all players are necessarily going to have a strong response to the subject matter. The writing is reasonably strong and definitely unrelenting, but I didn’t have a very strong response to it, probably due to my distance from the topic.)
Each of the five segments stands on its own, and each is very short, so I won’t comment too much on those. I did want to say that I thought the timed text was done well, contrary to @JoshGrams. This game overall is a good example of light styling and effects.
Anyway, the third choice, in the center of the range of options, makes it clear that it’s nigh-impossible to get things just right — subverting the Goldilocks lesson.
For the player, that means you’re not going to get a fully satisfying ending. For the author, presumably, it means eating disorders are something that you never sure you’ve full kept in check, though I don’t want to speak for them. But it’s a structure that allows for a bit of extra empathy between both author and reader, I think.
What It Isn’t
I also wanted to comment on what this game isn’t. I went into it expecting a full-fledged, dark parody of Goldilocks and the Three Bears centered around eating disorders.
Obviously, that’s partly because Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a children’s story. The cover art seemed to double down on that – it looks like children’s book illustrations, particularly the rough-line styles of Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Andy Stanton, and the like.
On one hand, I’d like the author to have taken the risk of writing a full-fledged parable that really plays off the Goldilocks story and its characters.
On the other hand, this is clearly meant to be a somewhat minimalist game that gets its point across about a personal experience, then leave you with it. And the central mechanic holds it up pretty well – maybe even better than it would with a larger game.
