Ratings and Reviews by streever
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Short little CYOA-style by young authors, December 27, 2016The tables are turned on a notorious thief in this cute little CYOA piece by two young authors. This piece began as an exercise in grammar, and sentences are indeed rich with adjectives and adverbs.
The piece could use more: more rooms, more stolen items, more choices, more editing, but it is a fun, cute little romp, with some humorous asides revealing a sense of whimsy and fun at the heart of this work. An especially charming moment occurs in the first failure option, when we follow the sound of barking to the guard dog, something the authors describe as a natural impulse of anyone who likes dogs.
Although a parser work, this piece felt like the classic CYOA: vocabulary is limited and options are usually obvious in this fun, short work. I hope the authors are encouraged by their final work and return to the format in the future.
Disturbing sci-fi story with echoes of Huxley, December 25, 2016This was a disturbing work which raises questions of complicity and empathy. What do we owe an amoral man? If someone has done the unthinkable to hundreds of people, what level of emotional response do we feel when he has the tables turned?
I don't know that this work provides a satisfying exploration of the deeper questions it asks. It's a short sci-fi work where we start off as the orderly who helps an egotistical doctor attempt to perfect mind control. We aren't given much ambiguity: we know what we're doing, we know the price that our unwilling test subjects pay, and we know that we're doing something evil that must be hidden.
Told over roughly three acts, this piece seems to ultimately ask if the end justifies the means, but cleverly without ever really showing us the ends. In the end, we have a chance to respond with how we feel about the question, but it doesn't feel like an answer to a grand question but a personal one.
This thought-provoking piece might have benefitted from more: a longer build-up, a longer denouement. I think a longer third act, with the question being posed later after a series of experiences, might have made it more enriching.
All in all a worthy effort which raises questions and leaves the reader wanting more.
Update:
I was able to progress by downloading the file and playing it offline, but, ran into another game-breaking bug later in the game when directions gave me the same error as in the car. I do think this work has a lot of promise and an interesting premise, but I've removed my star rating for now until I can actually play through it.
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This game has an interesting premise and seems to create an appropriate tone, but completely falls apart in the first 2 minutes.
Leaving your house to start the story results in a bizarre situation: you have a car in the driveway, but no seemingly no ability to go anywhere. "Go to kitchen", compass directions, "get in car", "Drive car", all produce error messages. "Open door" seems to work--the story informs you that you're in the car, the engine is running, and Uncle Jacob's house is 30-minutes to the east--but that's it. You can keep typing "open door" or "x car", but nothing really happens.
It's a shame, because the author seems to have put a lot of work into this. I don't know if the version is bad, or if it's a placeholder for a forthcoming work, but I look forward to re-playing it when it's fixed.
As an aside, it could use a little copy editing; I'm not ruthless about typos but found several.
Immersive little survival game, December 23, 2016This work is a blend of survival game and classic Choose Your Own Adventure; there are multiple bad endings, and it's easy to get them. Thankfully the built in save/load feature makes it fairly easy to save often.
One of the more interesting experiments in this piece is the use of a timer to hide color changes to the links. The sense of urgency or pressure this applies keeps the reader moving forward briskly, possibly to a bad end, which feels apt for the genre.
This is a dark work: the option exists to try to kill nearly everyone you meet, although I didn't take it whenever narratively possible. The piece works as a kind of homage to the setting and scenery of McCarthy's The Road, but without the underlying theme of fathers and sons.
Music and sound effects are used well to create an immersive atmosphere. This was a good effort and struck a nice balance in emulating the survival game genre.
Beautiful elegiac work, December 22, 2016This short, haunting piece requires the reader to advance (a) or retreat (r), with a variety of other actions suggested after you look at or examine the scenery. It's very linear, but like much great character-driven interactive fiction, the linearity feels natural as you discover your character and what their limitations and compulsions are.
Interspersed throughout the work are fragments of poetry from Basho, Kikaku, and other 17th-century poets. The end result is a haunting, elegiac work, telling a stylized version of the semi-historical story of Fuwa Bansaku, a 16th-century samurai.
Near the end, the work features a ukiyo-e print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, a 19th-century japanese woodblock printer; this famous image from his series, 100 Ghost Stories of China and Japan, seems to be the inspiration for this short and dramatic ekphrastic piece.
This is a beautiful use of the format and a moving, haunting piece, which should inspire the reader to learn more about Yoshitoshi, the poets, and of course, Fuwa Bansaku. Very lovely.
Cute little "one move" game in Twine, December 20, 2016This is a humorous little Twine game with essentially one move--blowing out the candles--but a dozen or more clicks as you think about who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and who the other people in the room with you are.
It's fairly short and amusing, with essentially two endings--a good and a bad one--both of which can be reached in about 5 minutes.
It was interesting to see a once experimental parser technique applied to a twine-like. I enjoyed it overall, but felt that tighter editing could be applied to the pacing and sense of momentum, something the author does well by show increasingly impatient guests waiting for you to blow out the candles.
Fun short spy story, December 18, 2016Quality writing and beautiful illustrations make this choice-based work a delight. Cinderella is reimagined as a secret agent, infiltrating the palace to steal military plans for the resistance.
The opening involves a short sequence where you choose your mission gear; play with obvious bad choices to see humorous responses from your handler, code named "Godmother".
This work is short but sets up a few fun replays, with a story-specific scoring system ranking you on stealth, revolutionary zeal, and a violence bonus. While I've found I can score higher or lower stealth stars, I don't know if I can actually change the outcome of the game, which seems designed to provide a humorous setup to the rest of the Cinderella story. A very fun little adventure.
Postmodernist take on Scrooge, December 17, 2016This beautifully-designed Twine work is a far from faithful retelling of A Christmas Carol, letting you summon an arbitrary number of ghosts of [your choice] to torment, berate, and possibly even square off in the squared circle for a wrestling match with old Elvenoozer Sprodge [Avenizer Flooge|Iboneezo Sprogue].
A mad-lib approach combined with randomized names for people and places contribute to the non-sequitur humor of this piece.
There are multiple endings, but they seem to be determined more by your final actions than the path you take to the ending, so feel free to experiment and have fun.
This short Twine piece tells the story of a young woman headed to her familial home after an outbreak of plague in California.
The piece is dark, with numerous 'bad' endings, similar in nature to a CYOA book; thankfully, Twine's default undo lets the reader move backward and continue past the bad endings.
I liked some of the small details throughout, which contributed to a sense of place and space, but the pacing was a weaker point, especially in the opening, when the backstory is told through a long series of choice-less clicks. I think parts of this read too much like a traditional narrative, and it could be edited tighter to leave a sense of mystery and questions. Do we need to know the details of the plague? I'd rather get more into my character--her motivations, her goals, who she is.
The actions didn't make me connect with the character, and I'm not sure if that's because this is such a short piece, or if it's because of the 3rd-party approach, where the character is never "I" but instead "she"; the consistent use of a third-party pronoun may have contributed to my sense that I was really just flipping the pages in an electronic book, not inhabiting a character and making choices.
I think this piece would benefit from some tightening and editing; the opening scene is well-done, and the writing does have a raw, natural rhythm to it. I think a little editing by the author (especially reducing the consistent use of 'she' throughout) would improve the overall writing and strengthen the natural rhythm the writer has.
Perfect short single-puzzle game, December 16, 2016This clever little piece offers a take on the development of language and tools, casting the reader as a cave-dwelling early man, with a simple task: get some medicinal bark to help your mate with her headache.
The writing is consistently funny and witty. Historicity is wisely sacrificed in service to the narrative--a dinosaur is featured in the final act--and it makes for an entertaining piece.
On a deeper level, the piece examines art, map-making, language, and human relationships, all in a short, relatively constrained piece hinging on one single puzzle.
It took me several replays to figure out what to do; every location is important, and with the possible exception of one reference I didn't get (the direction of the creek), relevant to that single puzzle.
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