Reviews by streever
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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.
A Surreal Trip to Veederland, December 16, 2016I loved this surreal little trip to Veederland. Winter Storm Draco has stuck; your job was to walk to the convenience store and pick up hot dogs, buns, and cheap wine for your roommates.
As a hearty New Englander, walking through a storm resonated with me, but of course, we can't buy wine at our convenience stores. That's a complaint about Connecticut, not about this wonderful work, which shares the same excellent sense of place that Veeder incorporates into his work.
Even though the game starts by getting you lost in a strip of woods between the highway and your neighborhood, it felt believable and real; I could easily draw a map of the area from memory alone.
One of the highlights of this work are the in-game clues. A slight bending of the 4th wall and a charming writing style lets Veeder directly suggest unusual actions and moves to the player, and it improves the overall work.
This piece has a mix of puzzles: a combat mini-game, a riddle, and a 'combine the items' puzzle. The variety makes it challenging, but all the puzzles are fair, logical, and obvious post-solution.
The ending is especially strong, and felt like a real-world experience, an important bit of grounding in an otherwise surreal piece.
Moving and intimate portrait of a friend, December 9, 2016This twine piece tells the story of Cadence, a young woman who the opening implies has died, through the letters and memories she shared with the narrator. The writing is good, making use of a strong voice and sense of rhythm.
The opening takes the form of a last letter, a farewell, to the narrator, a classmate who became her closest friend. The story flows well, with regular reveals of information, and an interesting mechanic of "starting over" at the end of every story node to learn more.
I didn't think this would work as well as it did; the first time I saw "Start Over" it was after two clicks, and I wondered if the piece would be tedious and repetitive, but it isn't at all. The mechanic works perfectly to let you learn more and explore the story in greater depth.
Overall, this was an affecting, moving work.
Unpolished little gem, December 8, 2016Although I enjoyed this quite a bit, this piece either ends ambiguously or is unfinished and has no ending, and it's almost pure linear; despite several play-throughs, I always ended up at the same place, mostly the same way.
But I enjoyed it. The writing had a nice rhythm to it and it was incredibly confident. This is clearly a work based on some other property, with which I am unfamiliar, and there were dozens of concepts I didn't understand, but without info-dumps and pages of backstory, I was able to figure out who I was and what was happening.
It's a noir-ish story that seems to take place in a supernatural reality. The little flourishes--you can act "mysteriously" for example--are a real treat. How did I get myself untied from the knots? Well, it's a mystery. I particularly appreciated the way the piece admitted it was cheating, but felt in-world and character.
The confidence mixed with the quality of writing made me especially sad that the ending was so unclear: if it does end, I'd recommend having some "Thanks for playing" page, just to make it clear, but I think the finale is very anti-climatic and doesn't read like an ending.
I would happily give this more stars for the confidence, narrative voice, and well-written paragraphs, but it needs to tie up the ending into something that feels like a proper ending, even if it's a "To be continued" page. I'd also recommend polishing the UI/look; this would benefit greatly from a little attention to the color scheme & maybe even illustrations if possible.
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