Haywire

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

A great superhero game divided into many small branches, June 9, 2019
This game could have been more accessible and/or popular with some design changes. It suffers strongly from “Time Cave” effect. Instead of having an overarching narrative, it’s made of a dozen or more distinct threads with very little in common. It branches wildly.

Each playthrough is, to me, a 3-star game. But the whole story is pretty cool. I discovered stuff on my 4th and 5th playthroughs that changes the whole story (although I am ever an enemy to slow-text in IF games ).

I could see this game having been made slightly more coherent, with some of the best scenes always occurring.

But this could all be down to author’s choice. Did the author want most of the game to be hidden away as a reward for the careful reader? That’s a valid design choice, limiting the number of people who enjoy the game but increasing the joy in those who do. Hanon Ondricek has many games in that style in the past, but he’s now done stuff in many styles.

Anyway, this is a pretty cool superhero story.

Edgy superhero origin story that invites multiple playthroughs, December 13, 2018
Haywire is a short (10 min. or so) game that invites multiple playthroughs. You play as Hayley Weir, also known as "Haywire," a homeless young woman. Hayley has some special abilities: She can (Spoiler - click to show)read people's minds and force them to see what she wants them to see. Or not see, as the case may be - Hayley can effectively render herself invisible. When the story begins she has only been using her powers to entertain tourists for pocket change.

There are lots of ways a story like this could go. Haywire has an edge to it, which worked for me. For example, here's an early passage from the game reflecting on Hayley's abilities:

(Spoiler - click to show)You could probably blackmail people, but blackmailers usually end up in the gutter with a bullet in the head or their head bashed in with a bat. No thanks.

Street magic is a lot more fun. And, most days, you earn enough to avoid starving.

Especially on the first few playthroughs, the writing and story pulled me in, and I wanted to find out what happens to Hayley. I also enjoyed the occasional pop culture nods, the references to (Spoiler - click to show)Simon and Garfunkel, Star Wars, and James Bond. All in all, I played through several times, finding four different endings. I suspect there are more.

I do think the writing could have been a little tighter in places, but (as I said earlier) the edgy tone of the writing worked for me overall.

My only other critique of Haywire is that I would have liked to have seen more options for how Hayley's story ends, as well as longer narrative arcs. Which is another way of saying that I was invested in the story and would have liked more game to play!

Well written, fun story that isn't too deep, November 2, 2018
Good writing and several different branches that make it worth playing through at least three times. However, you are just thrown into the story without much context and the characters aren't very deep. I think the author wanted to have a lot of different branches, but in this case it means that they were all fairly shallow.

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