Reviews by Andrew Schultz
Neo Twiny Jam
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500 Word Hotel Escape is about what you'd expect. It's not a huge hotel. But you overslept on the final day of vacation, and now it's locked, and your room is isolated. No easy way out.
It's not hard to lawnmower through, just searching everywhere, as you discover a key or two, as thankfully it's not all about finding keys. There is variety!
5WHE flipped the fears from the times in hotels I hoped I hadn't misplaced my key on their head--the point being you are busting out instead of in, and I found the ending to be lampshaded more than well enough. So there were nice little subversions.
I'm slightly bummed the author didn't slip in the other stuff they meant to. It feels like the writing could have been tightened up slightly, but then again, I found it tough to cut down my word count below 500. Perhaps some simple graphics would've helped, as a lot of the writing specifies directions e.g. "the window is behind." But this is technical quibbling. I think I'd enjoy seeing 1000 Word Hotel Escape to see what the author couldn't quite slip in.
Well, you got three 500-word entries in the Neo Twiny Jam, and the moderators gave the author their blessing to write entries as sequels of each other and I think the author made a good choice here. Perhaps if too many authors tried this, I'd say "hey, come on, write very different stories," but it acted as a relatively strong baseline, not trying to be to fancy or evoke too many emotions, and the 500-word limits provided balance. It was a good introduction to NTJ for me. But it definitely had its mystery!
You see, I managed to bungle things and read the second part first. As a result, I certainly was left wondering whether there was a breakup or whether someone was dying. I actually leaned towards the breakup and wondered if the third part had reconciliation! And of course I wondered how they met, and the first part probably hit harder than if I'd read them in order.
However, it is about death impending. It's very smooth, and while the interactivity isn’t huge beyond putting in names and choosing a few locations, that doesn’t affect much for me. It is about, well, people finding each other and living a life together, and their hopes for the beyond.
Re-reading it I was amused to note how it seemed to incorporate fantasy tropes (going out on adventures) as feeling like, maybe, a high-paying job in the real world that required a lot of travel. This was unexpected. I also enjoyed the brief discussion of their one kid much different than them. One generally doesn't think of such things, or you suspect character classes stay in the family, even if you need one of each class to go on a quest.
A longer word count might've caused it all to get too maudlin. I’m glad the author used these entries the way they did. I think the results were different than they would have been for, say, a 1500-word limit jam. It all felt well-paced and balanced. While the maximum interactivity may be picking the passages up after a week away and trying a different one first, I indeed did so. I enjoyed sketching the lives of the letter writer and receiver together in my mind, filling in the holes.
Ah, fitting in. All sorts of works can be written on it. How to do so. How fitting in may actually be bad. How it was nice, but you need time to yourself. JaNH looks at this--I read the author's blurb, but on replaying, I forgot it came about after research on autism. Of course it's awful to laugh at others' attempts to blend in if they just, well, want to blend in. But when they're trying to infiltrate a social order to disrupt it later, we should feel free to go ahead.
This is a brief humorous explanation of humanoids trying to fit in to human culture. But there are so many ways they fail, despite having done extensive research. The names don’t sound right. And ... well, no matter how much research they do on blinking, it fails.
Blinking is so natural to us, yet we can’t explain it. We don’t even know we do it, and it’s painful to keep our eyes open.
There’s a neat trick where you click on an eye and it opens up more text. It provided some much-needed color, though having a whole box of eyes blinking seemed like overkill. (Don’t click the big eye at the bottom.)
However, everything else was pretty effective. It’s easy for me to say “yeah yeah another game about fitting in,” but this offered genuine humor. There’s a chance to fail as well.
One thing about writing about fitting in, though, is it can be danged if you do or don't. If it fits in too much with the existing literature, it doesn’t push the envelope. And if it tries too hard to be its own thing, well, it isn't even TRYING to fit in, amirite? This is where individuality comes in, and while I think JaNH's text effects were a bit overdone, I found it fits well in the jam without surrendering what makes it itself, despite being about, well, not fitting in.
A side thought on playing through: some groups I felt obliged to fit in, not because I wanted to, I never realized that some people were, in fact, acting at “being themselves” but imitating their favorite comedians or celebrities or actors from a movie or even book characters. They seemed natural at the time. But they had done a research of sorts, too, like the aliens in this story, and of course they couldn’t tell me how to fit in, because it would blow their cover and show them as not original!
Over the years I've moved from "I guess I have to fit in here or somewhere" or "if I can't fit in here, where do I fit in?" to worrying less about this sort of thing. JaNH captured my former fears without, well, making me captive to them.
Being a Cat Person, I'll play any game featuring a cat, especially if it's on the cover. And it's not just on the cover. It bounces around a bit in the game and on the screen, in line with how you the powerful villain just can't bring it to heel.
This one was submitted just before the deadline, and it's one of those very happy entries that feel more like the author spent a lot of time wondering if it was worth the bother, because maybe it was too silly, but perhaps all that time thinking pushed forth a few ideas that made something funny. Whatever the reason it snuck in, I'm glad it did!
I enjoyed the expressive white line drawings on black, too, which it reminded me of times cats were being slightly impossible and there was not much I could do about it, but of course there were good special memories and I was sort of bummed I didn't have a camera handy.
There are three endings and not many choices to get there, this being a Neo Twiny Jam submission. I enjoyed comparing them a lot, and I think you will, as well.
Works that mention certain things almost always invoke certain reactions in me. In this case, it’s a relationship that went on too long, for 11 years. I was wondering briefly if it was someone who turned 11 and felt they were too big for certain things, or even friends who found each other when they were almost 11 and broke up in adulthood, but – well, it’s 11 years of sort-of stability. And of being in and out. As happens with friends, because life happens. The interactivity is based around rumination about things that could've been done differently, or things we didn't notice until too late--or things we didn't notice
I’ve been sucker punched by people who told me I was lucky to have them in my life, not I, like the narrator, was being used for someone to lean on and then run away. There were people I was just glad they didn’t point out how unexciting I was. Or if they did, they provided ways to become more exciting!
But they never really asked me what I cared about. They just assumed their needs and wants were more important than mine. But they did come with a few superlatives, which it felt rude to turn down–before the next long rut. I felt I was ripping them off, since I could not offer superlatives back.
I took a while to realize these quasi-friends were in the way of what I wanted long-term, which was different from what they were pretty sure I wanted or should want, because friends help friends find what we really want, right? And of course some of them let me know I interfered with their long-term goals. Perhaps they implied they no longer had enough time for me, and my response was to do a complete reflexive 180 and make time for them to live, as kids these days say, rent-free in myhead.
And it cut another way, too. Some people, I wanted to be better friends with, but suggesting I'd be interested seemed an implication they were not that exciting. There are also some people whose lives I went in and out of because I figured they had enough friends, and it never struck me until recently that they may've thought I thought I could do better than them or felt brushed off. Then there are the people I haven't seen for, say, eleven years, wondering if I should've done better, or trying to place down a detail that makes me feel better about not wanting to be around them.
It’s tough to remember these things, but not so tough as it used to be. I have my own examples that parallel this work, and I wrote down a few more after. Some featured periods longer than eleven years, some less. "I took notes on this" seems like backhanded praise for an emotional piece, but to me it says, I experienced more or better than just an emotional spike.
The language in almost eleven is straightforward, but meaningful. The lack of melodrama works well enough, I’m worried this review may be way more melodramatic than its topic. But I hope this review is somewhere around as illuminating as almost eleven was to me.
Some games in the Neo Twiny Jam seemed like they might have had to leave something out due to the word count, and the authors did a good job of packing the right stuff in.
Palazzo Heist does that and more. It works both as a standalone puzzle and something greater, and of all the entries I played so far, this is the one I most can see and, maybe, want to see expanded into something much bigger. You may guess that 500 words is too much to describe a full heist, and you'd be right. It takes a bit of time explaining what you want to steal and why (not just riches.) Then it simply has you try to enter the palazzo.
It's a neat puzzle, with all concrete details and no knowledge of Venice needed. But it has misdirection which adds to the atmosphere without being unfair, and everything you need to know is pretty much contained in the description. It has the feel of a parser game where you need to examine everything. And I mean everything!
There’s also a way to sort-of fail that I found amusing. I didn’t try it at first, because I was trying to get through, but I was glad to expand the author's world a bit.
Looking at the relative popularity of items in the jam, this one slid way behind the other's work, *Eviscerate This Girl*. DCYOA seems a lot more my speed, and I'd like to encourage others to give it some love or thought, too, if you haven't. You could simplify it down to just choosing 3 tarot cards from a pack. Instead of double-edged, murky, stuff like Death or The Wheel, though, it's odd gifts like a Celestial Pillow, which helps with Lucid Dreaming. Or you can visit a paradise resort, but you have to pay for a room. Nothing practical or earth-shattering, but always fun. You choose three, then at the bottom, you click at the end, and said three cards are together.
It's interesting to re-read through and see which is the best fit, but I was amused by how I quickly said some at the top were the best, or if I was offered them take-it-or-leave-it, I wouldn't wait for the next ones. They were too good.
But at the bottom is a choice that might expose my reflexive gratitude as selfish. It's a choice that allows gifts for others. You are less powerful. It's double the height and width of the other cards--whether the author just wanted to leave relatively little white (well, dark here) space or kind of unsubtly point out what they feel is the best gift here, I certainly had a moment of reflection. I'd been slightly enchanted by the possibilities and then felt like a bit of a bum, nothing to ruin my day, but I realized that even with gifts that seemed benign (as opposed to the ones from a Djinni that cause bad things to happen elsewhere) I hadn't thought much of ramifications, or What Was Really Important, or I assumed my gifts could cover WWRI later.
So whether or not it was intended to be a psychological experiment, I found it to be an effective one.
Neo Twiny Jam had a surprisingly large (to me) ratio of fantasy-quest games by authors, all of whom really seemed to know what they were doing. There've been a lot of works with emotional impact, too.
But this one combines both, while sneaking in under the maximum word count. I wasn't expecting what the curse was, and you probably won't, either.
Of course, given that it has some narrative, the tomb is not VERY big, or the quest VERY long. There's really only one puzzle and a few things to observe. It's a puzzle you can maybe guess, but said puzzle also has under a hundred states, so figuring an efficient brute-force method is a neat puzzle on its own.
It's a very clean effort, without extra fanfare, and I'm left with a clear feeling the author could (and should!) create something much bigger if they wanted. I'd also like to praise the cover art, which drew me in without grabbing me.
Finally, thanks to the author for including the source, and for telling us to experience their game before looking at it. It's in chapbook, and I used sugarcube in the jam, but several things still made immediate sense to me.
Piele is a work that probably isn't intended to make sense the first time through, but it was rewarding to make sense out of and figure what was going on. Even if I didn't already trust a work by Kit Reimer to Go Somewhere Interesting, it was pretty clear the confusion was 1) intentional and 2) added to the experience.
To overgeneralize, there's a small page text in a language you probably won't guess. I had fun doing so. It's not from a huge country, but not an obscure one either. The point is that you go through the process of deciphering stuff, not just translating, but understanding what the words mean. The writing is poetic in nature, with two poems of four lines each, and sometimes, when you click on it, the literal interpretations appear first before the translated ones do. So the meaning slowly pops up.
This feels like a work you should experience for yourself, as explanations or critiques on my part would either fall short or be just plain wrong. So I’m just going to mention that clicking on the ending twice kicks you to the end of the work, so avoid that if you want to see it all right away!
Hint for the language: (Spoiler - click to show)look at the accents. They are unique (AFAIK) to a reasonably-sized country. If you're stumped, (Spoiler - click to show)cut and paste and use Google Translate. I think it’s a good choice for what the author was (I think) trying to accomplish. And I think it was successful, and that’s why I’m only semi-revealing the spoilers.
One other thing that makes more sense after the first time through: (Spoiler - click to show)the cover art.
It's always good to see IFComp authors pop up somewhere else. Whether these people are publishing books or just clocking thousands of rep points on stack overflow, it's a reminder to me that while I enjoy having a corner of the internet, but I don't need to stay in a bubble. In fact, I should not.
The author wrote Flattened London for IFComp 2020 which was a combination of Flatland and Fallen London, and it was a pretty big and amusing parser game. Then for IFComp 2021, they wrote My Gender is a Fish in Twine. I thought it was an effective and succinct counter-measure to those who used gender pronouns as a joke, and it never got close to over-earnest crusading.
This is about a slightly supernatural cycle of life where someone's body is repurposed following death. It branches to three stories, then a conclusion. It has the odd effect of making, for a moment, (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism seem almost natural, each small story in a way reminiscent of how I read Native Americans performed rituals after hunting certain animals for food and made sure not to waste as little as possible out of respect for the animal's life.
But in our brief glimpse into Jacob's world, even what is not used, is used. And what is not used to clear constructive purpose has its own use in a way. It makes a clear case for content warnings, but paradoxically, the stuff that causes them is potentially the most uplifting or hopeful.
I hope Carter Gwertzman is writing other stuff, too, outside of comps and jams. I'm pretty sure that is the case.
(Note: Manonamora's review mentions the first sentence, which left an impression on me, too. Maybe you as well.)
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