TOITŪ

This was an interesting exploration of a place and a history and a local writer, but it frequently used language and hyperlinks in ways that felt unmoored and haphazard rather than the more grounded and integrated ways that I'd prefer. For a story about reconnecting with nature, it uncomfortably often used phrasings that I associate with a lack of connection to the physical world. And while I think the hyperlink usage is internally consistent, it was opaque in ways that felt more generically mysterious than crafted to evoke particular feelings and responses.

There are also some annoying bits of timed text where a poem plays out veeeery slowly. And the dialogue of the characters you meet is mostly in colored text with inadequate contrast so it's hard to read.

Anyway, language: take the second passage in the game:

when you look up, you can see the sun setting gracefully, devouring the expanse of ocean before it

the sky is {cycling: pink / orange} and the trees are like rusted warriors looking out over the horizon

it has been a few hours since you {cycling: drank / ate} and your body is starting to fail

The various mythologies that I grew up exploring have the ocean or horizon devouring the sun: I think of this flipped phrasing as a recent eggcorn or folk etymology that's a little out of touch with sunsets.

There are more than a few hours between meals, for most of us! Your body is not starting to fail already. And a short while later, we get the character walking up a hill, "you begin to trudge mechanically up the road, tugging your torso..." which yay, alliteration! But it makes no physical sense to me (you're leaning slightly forward when you walk; your torso goes first, you're not tugging it), so it fights with the game (trying to?) describe things in a very visceral, embodied way.

Also this work almost entirely uses the spelling "thru" but there are a half-dozen uses of "through." I thought that should be significant but couldn't see the pattern to it so it just ended up feeling sloppy.

Shortly after this, we go thru several body parts (hands, feet, torso) and cycle thru descriptions of each. Hands cycle between physical descriptions which are drastically different in a way that I liked, but then ends with "smooth and scarred" which feels like a contradiction. Feet's first description is physical but then it goes far more abstract, feeling like a sequenced poem told through the cycling link but not making much sense as individual descriptions, while the torso feels similar but a little more concrete and each line does make a little more sense as a description. And overall they didn't cohere for me into a bigger picture, and the RPG-ish "choose your character's attributes" meshed awkwardly with the attempted poetry.

Then in Part One we get a bunch of exploring and freeing the stream, and a couple of these felt very adventure-game-ish — e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)most plastic doesn't sink very fast and you're certainly not going to be able to dredge up a bunch of sunken beer bottles with a random strip of plastic tarp so that one made no sense.

As for the hyperlinks: in the Prologue we start with cycling links within the passage, with the last word or words being a link to move forward. Then it starts mixing in short side-trips, again with only the last link moving on. Then it turns into a bit of a maze — can you find your way out of the Prologue? And when we get into Part One it turns into more of an exploration in the form of place descriptions where you can click to to go to the adjacent places mentioned within the description. Then in Part Two it gets more menu-ish with links at the bottom that do stuff and links in the body that give short nested descriptions and then return — except that for the lock-and-key puzzles the link to use the item you've found is never the last one, it's always in the body, so I kept clicking them by accident and then having to exit and re-enter and click thru to that point again.

Part Two also gets more lawnmower-ish, introducing a fast-travel method so now the game is a set of disconnected places instead of a single space to explore. And the game doesn't really give you reasons to visit one before another so it felt less compelling: it looks like we're giving you a new freedom but actually we're just giving you a checklist; can you collect all the places?

In hindsight I can see how this works, but while playing it felt pretty arbitrary and confusing and tumbling from one form into another, and I didn't get a sense of intentional confusion toward a particular end, so...

It was an interesting experience and I'm glad I played it, but I more often felt "hmm... ok, I can see what you're going for" than "oh, that's a beautiful way to express that."