Portrait with Wolf

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 7 May 2025.

This is a curious parser piece, where you ostensibly put together different motifs to create art works (with the art works explained in text format), and aim to fill an art gallery with 8 different art works. I got 4/8 endings, and couldn’t unlock all 8. I gather from other reviews that this work reuses the poetry of Sylvia Plath, but I’m too unfamiliar with that to connect with it.

I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this piece. I think there’s a lot more depth to it than I was feeling. But I struggled to engage with it. Which isn’t any fault of the author. Just some things click for some folks and not others. I’m also one of those folks who tends not to get on with more abstract works, and prefers things spelled out simply.

I also struggled a little with the parser interface on my low resolution enormous font laptop screen. The game text kept filling the screen and I’d have to constantly tap to show more, but then with my hand control problems I risked entering the wrong next option, which was rather crucial to get right. So it was a rather fraught playing experience for me.

But again that may well have been just me.