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1-7 of 7 What Mysteries the Night Holds? At Least Two Dozen..., July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 40 min, 26+ Endings
Talk about right-footing me. Something about “An enthralling tale with more than 25 endings!” when the title proclaimed 26 just tickled me. The intro screen further cemented my good will by providing 4 hilariously disparate possible endings, only to sadly tell me no, those don’t count. Between the instructional text and these examples, the stakes and purpose of the game were communicated economically and amusingly: FIND ALL THE ENDS!!
After that it is a click-select exercise to explore all the narrative branches. Some very short, others long and extended, only a few reconvergent. The scope of the game is about right to keep all branches in your head, almost. Like most time loop games, after reading text once, you madly click past text on subsequent cycles to get to the new stuff. A bit of a chore for long paths, but the game is smart about rewarding your perseverance with skip-ahead, jump to branch-point, and achievement unlocks to keep things moving after you collect enough endings.
There is ample wit on display. Which is about the coldest, least convincing way to convey the pleasant humor of the piece. (“Oh really, ample wit you say? Well ha ha HA indeed.”) It was at its best when it ramped from mundane to transcendent dizzyingly fast. I chortled aloud at (Spoiler - click to show)“Have you touched the divine?” Mostly I was just kind of smiling as I went.
At about the 30min mark, I started questioning myself as I continued, “Is this too long for what it is?” Just asking that question felt like a yes. The more interesting question is, “Why so?” Here’s what I came up with: the early promise of the game was 26 wildly divergent endings and paths, the humor residing in the disparity. I didn’t count, but it felt like the truly disparate endings (and make no mistake, they’re in there!) amounted to a third or less, the rest being variations on them. Meaning you get a few unique, then 4-6 variations of one, 2-3 another, 3-5 of another and so on. To me, this chipped away at the early promise enough to let me feel the time. And some of these variations were noticeably less ambitious than others. If they had been more audaciously varied, I think it would better justify the length.
The work was well polished, no noticeable bugs. Most interactions are single-screen easily digestible chunks. The early warning screen was notably longer, and by notably I mean I didn’t realize I needed to scroll for an embarrassingly long time. Otherwise, definitely a smooth presentation.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Comedic Time Loop
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would invest in committing to the bit: reduce or even eliminate the endings that are modest, reasonable variations. The more tortured the logic, the funnier it’ll be. Just test myself to see how many unconnected bananas end states and scenarios I could pack in. More than 25!
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Counting Endings, June 8, 2023A mundane start that spirals off in multiple wild ways with each path you pursue. The storytelling is fast and the humor is pretty good throughout. I was oddly compelled to find each ending, while I’m not usually interested in doing that, so that goes in the game’s favor. I also enjoyed the rewards doled out as you hit certain numbers of endings.
Not one story but many, May 17, 2023This is a solid branching-narrative Twine story which begins with trying (and mostly failing) to get to sleep at night. It’s got a kind of immediacy to it, and it’s easy to get hooked into the stories. A good innovation, for a game with “more than 25 endings” is that, when you’ve reached a few endings, it makes it easier to navigate them. For example, the game opens up a list of the endings found so far, and (later on) gives you the option to restart from the last significant branch-point, two design points which should be widely used amongst games of this kind.
The branching paths do sometimes meet, but mostly it’s a story that leads out into all kinds of different directions(Spoiler - click to show) - you get caught up in shady dealings at work, or end up in a monastery, for instance - that are unexpected and make it a good, unpredictable read.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Branching narrative amusing game about insomnia, May 16, 2023This is a short Twine game with multiple endings. I liked the intro explaining (especially for newcomers to Twine) how the interactive story and clickable links work. And I really appreciated the option in the game to go back to the last checkpoint if you reach an ending, rather than go back to the very start every time.
The writing is amusing, but I was initially wondering if I would explore too far, if things got too repetitive. But in the end I played through to see all the different endings. It’s a branching narrative, so they’re not too hard to reach, but it just takes time. The writing is a good reward though. Lots of amusing scenes played out, multiple genres, neatly written.
As an insomniac I could also relate to so much of this, albeit with more amusement than tossing and turning. Thanks to the author!
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Funny and technically/narratively worthy, May 15, 2023As a fellow Spring Thing 2023 author, I was amused to note a similarity between Insomnia and Write or Reflect–well, WoR in helpful mode, anyway! Both have a possibility of going to endings you’ve seen before. (Insomnia has a bit more writing as a payoff, and said writing is better organized through some pretty diverse adventures!)
But they have different mechanisms for helping you to find all the different endings, so to speak.
Also, I’d like to thank the author for an early encouraging note to me about WoR. I hope this is good payback. So any suggestions here are “It’d be neat to do this too!”
WoR’s helpful mode lets you know if you’re about to walk into a node where all endings are covered. So you will get there, and rather quickly, by trial and error. It forces you to find the right path, which may ruin the fun of exploration.
But Insomnia leaves a bit of a puzzle. It’s quite up-front about things and I think even the endings seem to be organized so that, say, ending #1 is “first choice all the way through” and #26 is “last choice all the way through.” So you have a neat idea of what you can target and when and how. There’s some neat intuition here that I like, because while I enjoy branching Twine games, I sort of cringe at having to look at the source to knock off that last ending or two. Whether or not the endings diverge as much as Insomnia!
So I’m not aware of anything else that handles the endings as Insomnia does. But I’d be interested to see others, because I think it’s a great idea well-executed that helps it go beyond "yet another zany Twine game with clever fun writing." Especially since Insomnia doesn't try to slide on its zaniness alone. There's a funny ethical dilemma (well, not really) and I was amused to find the main villain was someone named Richards. With apologies to people whose last name is Richards, I laughed, remembering a line from a story I never wrote in college: "Geez, you have Richards this year for English? What an asshole!" Richards is, indeed, worse than that. I thank Insomnia for dredging up my irrational subconscious hate of people surnamed Richards. Especially if they have mustaches and wear corduroy blazers with elbow patches. (That's part of my never-published story.)
Insomnia's structure and bumpers open up possibilities for creating Twine-ish paths elsewhere, maybe even allowing the player a difficulty knob of how much they want to spoil.
For instance, you could have a counter saying, once you’ve hit all the endings in the (Spoiler - click to show)UFO branch (there are four) two times, that one is blocked off somehow or the node is bumped back! It seems like this would be tricky to do in Twine, but it would allow for a VERY branching game with even more than 26 endings so that the player’s energy would focus less on staying patient and juggling endings and more on the writing.
(Another neat idea, especially if the game had meta components, would be to allow the player maybe 2-3 glimpses at a branching ending map. Or maybe even label the endings 11111, etc., based on which choice gets you somewhere in the minimum tries.)
Insomnia is definitely a fun light-hearted read but it brings up some (to me) engaging, serious issues of how to keep the player’s attention and the niceties we should add to help them along and feel the optimal amount of stuck so we had a neat challenge, without giving up!
All these considerations, though, are nothing to lose sleep over. Ha ha ha.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Branching gameplay of goofy stories, May 14, 2023This game is almost a pure 'time cave', a style of game structure that was popular with a lot of paper CYOA books. Basically every choice branches, with each branch having a different ending. I say it's almost a time cave, since some paths end up recombining later on, but there's not a lot of state tracking in the story itself.
The main drawbacks of such a story are a lack of coherence in the storyline and boring repetition of early material. This story addresses the first by being wacky and nonsensical (so incoherence is a plus) and the second by adding a 'checkpoint' system once you find enough endings, of which I found all 26.
I'm usually not impressed by zany humor but I genuinely found this game funny. It reminded me of Simpsons humor a bit. I've seen that it fell flat for some other reviewers, but humor, especially surreal humor, is so subjective that you're always going to have enjoyers and disenjoyers. I liked this enough to play through all endings.
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4 people found the following review helpful:
What did the monk say to the sleepless man?, May 4, 2023(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)
What a welcome surprise! I expected this to be an elaborate joke game, where you die in various hilarious/gruesome ways a link or two removed from the start-screen. The fact that the intro-screen already offered a bunch of non-official endings strengthened my belief that this game was going to be a riff on unnecessarily complex choice games that tap into the human brain’s tendency to collect-'em-all.
And yes, Insomnia does that. It does it extremely well, with various bonuses and achievements handed out as you reach more endings. (I liked being able to change the subtitle!)
But!
I’m actually very impressed by the depth, detail, and variety of the stories. The author obviously was invested in treating the branching narratives as interesting premises in their own right, following through on the player’s choices to their ultimate, sometimes extremely zany, sometimes thriller-serious, consequences.
The writing is engaging and considered, another sign that the stories are a serious matter (silly as they may be), not just a way to get the player to groan at the next failure. I found myself strongly captivated by a few of the pathways through the piece. Among the other well-written storylets, these stood out for me as blueprints for exciting short stories or games on their own. ()
If I may add a small nitpick, even the more serious storylets () are told in the same fast-paced humorous voice as the zaniest ones. These more tense pieces might benefit from a shift in tone to reflect the actual sorrow they cause the protagonist. (2 cents to be picked up or ignored, of course.)
A great ending-hunt with hidden depths.
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