Reviews by Chrysoula
twine
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Kind of a maze, November 12, 2014This game had a lot of interesting components that just didn't add up. It consists of a number of longish pages of text peppered with links to other pages; the links on any given page always lead the same place (as far as I could tell). After a while it started feeling like a maze, which I found an interesting idea-- but not one I managed to solve.
The story, too, was interesting: exploring the history of a young woman who fell out of a window. It's supernatural and creepy and interesting-- but it's just a little too much information presented in a very dry way to really get invested in. I skimmed.
And the voice, finally, was interesting: dry, matter of fact, disinterested, almost scholarly. Omniscient, too: I was getting information from each click but there were no eyes attached to that information. I wanted to know more about how it worked, but I couldn't find the key to the maze, maybe because the long passages of hyperlink-studded text was hard to process and the voice made it even harder to engage.
This was surprisingly satisfying., November 11, 2014I went through this once, after discovering it on the Twine Garden, and I got two endings. I think there was a major fork at a midpoint but I was satisfied enough by the endings I got that I had no interest in exploring what happened if we didn't capture the unicorn.
Story-wise, it's interactive fiction about being an ugly maiden in a unicorn-haunted forest, and all the hunters who come to buy your services. I expected something I'd actively dislike, because I'm opinionated about unicorns (I discovered this game a day after viewing a screening of The Last Unicorn with Peter S. Beagle....)
...but I didn't dislike it. It was competently written. It worked for me.
As for interactivity, it's Twine. It has many endings but I only personally identified a couple of forking points. It's the kind of story where you click throughout the page to get more information and then return to the main story.
It didn't take too long to play. Recommended for an entertaining fantasy half an hour.
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