Reviews by Andrew Schultz
Neo Twiny Jam
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This is a story about the last night of a closed mall before it is demolished. You sneak in, hoping to find memories. It’s well done, with the sound manipulated at a critical point.
I haven’t visited a mall in ages but I am sad to read of ones I liked closing down. I remember thinking when I grew up I would go to one of those big malls and eventually buy one item from each store, except maybe the jewelry and such. But when I grew up I generally had favorite bargain outlets or waited for the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas to pick up sales.
Adults would moan how malls got rid of forests or parks or whatever when I was young, and these days I'm sort of mourning the loss of malls and food courts and such, even though I never spent much there and appreciate when bike paths or nature areas are set aside. Malls seem so impractical, but of course we can't drown in those memories.
YCSHF captures that and in a different way from Jim Aikin’s super-long The Only Possible Prom Dress, which also takes place after-hours in a mall, but it celebrates the oddities of malls with all sorts of odd stores with jokes. Here the limited word count here leaves plenty of mystery and reminds me of how malls got smaller, or they started having empty storefronts. And yet I'd still love to explore more of this abandoned mall. Both works got me to thinking of franchises I saw in all sorts of malls and went bankrupt. I finally Googled a few of them.
The Neo Twiny Jam and its word limit were good for mood pieces where, dang it, you don't have to explain yourself, and it would feel wrong to, and it'd go over the word count anyway. So it provoked a number of fun entries where, well, a variety of main characters couldn't explain themselves!
In the case of Scale, you're a fish in a tank which isn’t very big. Not much happens, allegedly. But it’s surprisingly absorbing. There are the typical things you find in a tank, like a rock, or bubbles, and you get fed every night, with seasons turning at an alarming rate. There’s also a chest you may be lucky enough to see open. It took me a while, and I’m not sure if it was out of skill or luck or just persistence.
There’s some nice humor in here. It’s slightly surreal and yet feels like you expect a goldfish-pet’s life would feel. I was sort of worried I would die, so I kept playing, and it says something that I kept playing for a while that I looked at the source. It's one of those works you remember with a smile. The lack of (meaningful) agency charmed me and never felt oppressive.
It was disturbing to take a step back and realize my own leisure could be described similarly: "you go to the library/athletic center/store/tinker around at your computer." But I still enjoyed the experience.
This is a short Twine about someone who receives what feels (to me) like an inappropriate, random gift and being quite confused about it.
I think a lot is left to the reader’s interpretation, because the choices you took the first time are crossed out, which I realize is nontrivial Twine coding, whether branches at any one page lead to the same next page or somewhere different. And different information is given on different passages through.
I think we've all gotten gifts in the mail we find hard to throw out. We understand it's a business and a bunch of emotional manipulation going on. But there's something odd when it comes from a person--especially a person whom we didn't like much. If it's appropriate--well, how did they know so much about us? If it's inappropriate--well, can't we give them credit for trying? The whole thing reminds me of the South Park episode where the food pantry gets a lot of creamed corn from donors. A fancy watch is, of course, more valuable than creamed corn, but -- it's not exactly uplifting, is it? In fact, it would stand out next to cheap clothes and maybe even be an easy target for thieves.
I’ve certainly been suspicious of people who’ve given me gifts for no reason before after some bad history. I’ve had people suddenly be nice to me for a bit, often with ulterior motives. Perhaps in this case the (very) wealthy benefactor feels they’ve washed away some sin. Maybe they feel guilty they got out of the town they hated, or maybe they remember doing something bad to the narrator. But there is no indication their act would be a net positive.
This seems deliberate on the author's part. The title of A/The suggests the giver has given out other gifts like this before. So there's an odd spooky feeling This one is odd and spooky without anything supernatural. Just maybe someone trying to whitewash something in the past. At least that's what I got from it. Given this is Neo Twiny Jam and the author said you can fill in details, there's enough flexibility in the story, you may find your own interpretation.
I remember the author's name looking familiar, and then I realized they'd written a lot of IFDB reviews. I hadn't recalled them writing any works that could be reviewable on IFDB, so I was glad to see Neo Twiny Jam gave them an opportunity to be on the other side.
This is a short conversation where you head to a doomed sales pitch, which is doomed because of your social awkwardness and the uselessness of what you’re selling. It’s benevolent towards the poor confused protagonist (punching down would be easy but wrong) who may have visions of being someone who repurposes or synergizes (obligatory buzzword) two ideas that, well, are less than the sum of their parts. They think they have found something new. Perhaps the only reason it is or seems new is that everyone else who thought of it ignored it.
I may be reading too much into this, but the night before playing, I was reading yet another article about how everyone in America is fed that you need to be an entrepeneur to really make it, or entrepeneurs deserve a lot more than work drones, or do you really just want to be in a cubicle all your life without being able to order people around? Or wave stuff in front of people’s faces saying "You don’t know you want this, but really, you do," and then they fawn and say "Oh my goodness yes we always wanted this but never realized it?" You should have ambition! It keeps the economy running, and stuff!
The poor main character in this piece has ambition and persistence. It’s easy to poke holes in what they do. But I think of all the times I tried to combine two unrelated things together and failed, and I felt I deserved to make that connection, and I was pretty sure I had something new. I was never brave enough to go to a bunch of CEOs with my ideas. Maybe that was for the better.
Still, I want to try piecing things together and making connections, in my writing, even if I fail as badly as the Sprinklepills salesperson. It really captured a lot of the fears I would feel if I were in a job where I had to make a lot of cold calls. It even got me out of my chair and in a good enough mood to take care of some things that made much more sense than selling Sprinklepills.
This was an entry in Neo Twiny Jam but would clearly also have fit in the Single Choice Jam conducted by the same organizers as well. It's pretty simple--you are a papier-mache puppet among a bunch of wooden ones. You fall apart more quickly, and while you'll be put back together after dancing like the wooden puppets, there's a worry your creator won't do this if you go your own way.
Given that PPP advertises itself as queer horror there are obvious parallels e.g. "come on, you have more rights than you would've had in the 60s. Turn that frown upside-down!" or some such nonsense. You're doing ... well enough, right? But you want more.
This is hardly a new theme but it's always nice to see it expressed in new ways, and here, it is.
Maybe it's that I don't like to talk about the same sorts of things most people do, or read the same things. Or maybe it was in high school that I wasn't excited by fast cars, or I didn't crave a management position, or I (no, this doesn't make me a Marty Stu) wasn't as eager to bash people not in Honors courses. Or maybe I enjoyed certain odd math problems instead of the ones that made chemistry or physics clear to you. Or, like the puppet, I tended to have less endurance for conversations.
This sort of thing persisted into adulthood, with the constant "well, you can make compromises, can't you?" But of course the benevolent (as the author says) hand also restricts you. Perhaps you are in a company where the pay is good enough and it's not as conformist as the next place--really, you could do worse--but you want more, and you're not willing to go home and play MMORPGs with the same crowd you work with. Or you might find an Internet community where you fit pretty well but they can't satisfy a certain part of you, and perhaps you could be more convival or popular if you said certain things, but you couldn't and didn't. (I am thinking about past communities, maybe where others enjoyed retro games, but some people were just annoying. Not the current one! I mean, to the extent that no one community should be enough for us, yes. But this review isn't a manifesto.)
So this sort of thing is appreciated, and if people really shouldn't appropriate it all for ourselves, we can definitely go back to the well and get more inspiration from it. We should have many such sources, and they should go beyond arguments like "you're too good for those bums" or "you're not totally weird, so you deserve something, I guess."
Count me among the people who think Tarot cards are nonsense. Perhaps even having a game where you try and find meaning from them is nonsense. I remember storming through Fool's Errand blissfully unaware of what the Tarot was. That was enough for me -- bringing out all sorts of weird things to figure out and achieve.
And yet, if something doesn't try to suck you in too far to mysticism, it can work quite well. The 500 word limit for Neo Twiny Jam seems to work well, so an author doesn't try anything crazy. There are three cards to choose from, and you eventually choose all three. The order doesn't seem to matter. Each one sends you through a surreal adventure where the choice is to have fun, or give up and not have fun. You can guess which is right. This isn't to bash AWotB as "oh, a kid could figure it out," but it makes for easy replay to explore all the paths you want to. There's certainly a feeling of "oh, can I do anything weird and supernatural here?" And with each of the three choices, you do.
There are two endings, a wholly healing one and a reflecting one. It's a smooth experience, and the Unsplash photos add to the effect. I was left wanting more, all while well aware that when stuff like this gets too long, it may go in for mysticism.
AWotB also keeps your own life and worries, and why you went to a friend for a tarot reading, as a generality. Perhaps this was due to the word count, or perhaps it was a sly dig at how many people who dish out Tarot cards speak, themselves, in generalities. That said, given that I wasn't looking too hard for help, it was a neat journey, and after I played it, I felt up to doing some annoying tasks I'd been putting off. So it served its purpose, in its own way, perhaps because I wasn't looking too hard for anything. This may not be related to mysticism but more to just remembering to lett your mind wander a bit and not pressing too hard, or taking a break from Internet sites whose business model is wasting your time and draining your energy.
Whichever, it's quite nice.
Near the end of Neo Twiny Jam, a lot of people submitted games, and my goal of reviewing half the games before the end went kaput. On balance, this is a good thing. More to review later. But given my goals, it felt like I had something taken away from me, even though I really hoped to see as many entries as possible.
Clarence Street, 14 was one of those. In fact, it seems to be bit hard by coming in before the final wave, so if you look at games submitted by reverse date, it's not easy to see. But the title intrigued me.
You see, the title gives more mystery for an American reader, since we don't have very many addresses here under 100. The most notable exception I remember is in the Chicago Loop, at State and Madison, which is officially the zero north and west point. As you go further north, Lake Michigan moves west. Until then, posh stores give way to mansions, which give way to a park. And of course 10 Downing Street is a famous foreign address.
So the story had a good bit of mystery from me just reading the title. And it kept up through, for 500 words. What is it? What is the character doing there? And why? This is revealed at the end.
I liked how the tension built, and I liked how things seemed legitimately different after the reveal, which felt more than fair and logical. I saw the character in a different light, definitely. In fact I liked this better than Collision, which got a lot of deserved nice comments, because the surprise twist here felt a bit more real. They are both worth it. (The author had a third entry, too!) It certainly makes me want to work through other late entries to make sure I didn't miss anything else really good.
Semi-spoiler with meta-thoughts: (Spoiler - click to show)the character has gotten lost in the shuffle, like the game with all the other Neo Twiny entries. I won't say much more.
For me if something is going to be linear and use effects, it either needs a buildup or payoff. And in vanitas it has both.
You can see where it's going pretty quickly. Two friends more or less stay in touch as the dominant social platform changes. They discuss how nice things were, well sort of, while also realizing how bad it was. (False nostalgia is touched on quickly and effectively.) You may or may not recognize each individual site as you hit space and go through various conversations.
The ending, which is very much worth it, seems meant to be open for interpretation. It's creative and lampshaded a bit. It certainly made me think of how exciting it must have been for my parents or grandparents to be using the telephone more regularly, maybe complaining about how people can listen in, or how the phone monopolies are ruining everything. It reminded me of a whole bunch of nuisances, such as busy signals with no answering machines available. And that is the unemotional side.
vanitas is not a very tangly game. You can just hit space a bunch, then tab your way to open the next social media site. But it's effectively done, and the aesthetics are not there to show off, and the final two scenes are definitely worth your time. I recommend just poking around to bulldoze through rather than noting this spoiler, but since we only have so much time, (Spoiler - click to show)the final two scenes look into communication into the past and are deliberately obscure, as people's complaints about Zuckerberg or Musk may seem 100 years from now.
This was a relatively quick Neo Twiny Jam entry without too many choices, but what were there were quite funny. A lot of details aren't filled in--you've warped to some odd reality to track down someone who's, well, been warping through realities too much. How strong their essence is, you don't know. They only give cursory excuses. It's unclear whether they're evil or ignorant.
That said, you have a job to do, and there's some mystery as to if anyone is at the typewriter.
The ends are abrupt, and that works for NTJ, because they needed to restrict the word count and also provide a few passages through, and because it's about the apocalypse. I also enjoyed the detail of a portal folding into your pocket--it's good surreal stuff presented quickly.
Despite giving relatively few branches, DGtT got me thinking of what its universe was, how it was built, and so forth. I enjoyed it on its own, and making up my own backstory, which seems to me proof the author used their words well. But I would still enjoy reading how the author themselves would've expounded on it.
Bitsy has been a very valuable defense against having too much angst at once from a game. For me it reinforces that the game is not trying to crush you with detail. It says, I'm trying to paint with relatively broad strokes with these pixels, and you may fill the details in, if you wish. And so I do, much more than with much slicker productions. Perhaps it also says, to someone who remembers GameBoys and GameBoy Colors, that there was more than just basic shoot-em-ups available there, and we can still find them.
That's not to say it invokes nostalgia, but it reminds me that progress needn't be just about higher graphical detail or more color or whatever. It reminds me of stuff I always wanted to do, of my own basic programming efforts to move someone around with a cursor and arrows on the Apple. And yet at the still at the same time it can still give a complete and small world.
Even if the world is, technically, only two rooms large, as in Letters To a Friend. That's more than okay. And the whole "my apartment and I'm lonely and maybe it's COVID" thing. But the apartment itself is kind of cheery, with a wardrobe and such. As you bounce into scenery, you note things like you haven't really needed to buy any clothes, but you really should take the recycling out, because this sort of stuff does pile up.
And that's the main thrust of the game. You haven't checked your mail from a while, and there are letters from a friend. The catch is, it's someone you don't know. And you figure they must be regular. It reminded me of emails I forgot to send back and emails I didn't receive back, and I promptly went out and wrote them. It ends on a positive note. (Though I'd have liked an ending screen instead of scrolling back to the top.)
Elitists may claim this sort of thing doesn't wash in the long run, but seeing a regular drip of efforts like this certainly make me want to try something in Bitsy. It's versatile and lets you say what you mean to say, without feeling you have to oversell it, and that hits me as an author and reader/player. The one-bit graphics give a certain charm that say "You know, I'd like this character to live in more than two rooms, nice as it is," even as another part of your brain might be horrified at the thought of living in two rooms for so long.
Bitsy seems to have a certain baseline and shell against really rough stuff--it's hard to do anything to gross anyone out--and LtaF goes well above that. Maybe the novelty of Bitsy will wear off for me, but then, when I first saw it, I thought it would wear off quite fast. It hasn't, because of efforts like this.
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