/I couldn’t find a place where I could discuss some games without necessarily writing a full review, so I am creating this post should other authors feel the same. I usually play games just once, whatever the turnout - a superstition from my childhood which makes me “choosing my own adventure” more wisely /
Canvas Keepsakes
I’ve just finished playing one storyline of Canvas Keepsakes by C.T.O’Mahony. I ended up with an unusual pet which had a pet of its own - even more unusual (after having lost a lifetime on WoW, I came uo liking pets in games as such) , which I utmostly enjoyed. Both of them.
Now to the game. I would like to know how long it took the author (authors) to create such a full game, and also, how many more endings I missed.
I also enjoyed the artist’s realistically described kitchenette, and the Artistivore, of course.
Eudokimos (Wonder of the Woods, in As I Sat on a Sunny Bank, Back Garden, together with Leontine)
I’ve just played part of Succor by a team of authors in the Back Garden. I intuitively started tidying up - and it gave me such satisfaction that I felt an urge to tidy our own apartment - am on sick leave with my daughter and tidying makes much bigger difference to my wife than to me . I also tried to make a custom entry in the [spolier] journal [/spoiler] but then I accidently used (bad habit) the go-back button on my smartphone and all my progress
and stats got lost. All the same, the memory of satisfaction remained. Funny how changing something outside seems linked to the change-hungry world inside. I spontaneously started thinking of a new game idea solely about tidying… a “Thorough Clean-up” perhaps? (I remember a play by an unknown author bearing this title) Might be worth trying. Thanks for the game. Pitty I was not able to order the soup . Perhaps I will give it another try later (and keep remembering the back button
Thanks so much for playing Canvas Keepsakes and for the lovely review! I’m glad you liked the pets haha
I started writing it in early February during a Writing for Video Games course with the Irish Writers Centre. I don’t have a programming background and had only ever used Twine for outlining stories previously, so it was a challenge! I didn’t get the game finished until last week, so it took me around two months start to finish.
As for endings, there are:
3 main endings based on your heart’s desire.
3 demons to paint (each gets a unique line or two at the end provided they haven’t been killed).
2.5 romance options (more on that below).
Cat outcomes: 0, 1, or 2 cats with you by the end!
Spoilers for Romance:
Fetter: Help them at Partially Digested Artscapes, then pick “Flirt” for a kiss scene at the end.
Nervo: Choose “Go find Nervo” at Partially Digested Artscapes, then choose “You’re loathe to admit it, but Nervo is pretty hot…” for a kiss scene at the end.
Classic Demon: Paint her, then pick “This beautiful woman” at Partially Digested Artscapes—no kiss, but an extra line at the end.
(Note: You can only romance one character per playthrough, so if you select “This beautiful woman” you won’t get the option to flirt with Fetter or Nervo.)
Spoilers for Cats:
Upset Pixel too much, and he’ll ditch you.
Find Vex by taking the locket keepsake and entering her picture during the demon fight. Keeping her alive is tricky—you need to apologize to Pixel instead of aggroing Nervo. If she does die, there’s a little epilogue bit.
Thanks again for playing and the kind words! I’m looking forward to getting stuck into all the other games.
P.S. The course I mentioned is running again in May, online here. The bits on twine might not be advanced enough for people here, but Charlene’s writing tips/exercises and industry insights (e.g., working on Baldur’s Gate 3 etc.) are fantastic!
I’m glad there’s a thread for this. No idea if Ronynn is on this forum, but I wanted to mention that I’ve adored their delightfully wacky game Interview Interview, which made me laugh.
Hi, CTLemur, nice to meet you. I am glad you liked my comments. I am not going to read your spoilers untill I try the romace a good trick to make a player curious
Maddie, this thread was created from mere impatience. There is so much interesting stuff this year. In a moment you will see the real reviewers in action (Rovarsson and JJMcC’s are aready posting their first teasers). But, as Brian says, as far as we keep this thread nice and supportive, there should me no harm.
Still recovering from Spring Thing, and I have games from other jams and competitions to play. So, here are some quick thoughts of what I’ve played so far:
Radiance Inviolate by DemonApologist is a delightful read that makes the writer side of me quite envious. The mellifluous prose, the queer tensions, it’s got a lot of things that make vampire fiction quite fascinating to read!
Test Subject: Synaptix by mkellygames is a fun romp. The game reminds me a lot of Porpentine’s Parasite, though this is far more lighthearted. The interactivity of clicking on actions is quite engaging since I have to also untangle the ethics of participating in an experiment like this.
Hi Kastel, I want to thank you again for Spring Thing 2024. You quite nicely reviewed our Deep Dark Wood. Are you going to open your own thread again this year? You seemed to have experience on reviewing children fiction.
I really envy you, folks, the lightness with which you produce reviews, those adjectives, the eloquent style, the vocabulary - you boasters! I’m sure it might have something to do with mother tongue, but thinking how I handle my own, I am not that sure it has.
Maddie, I played through two storylines in your Test Subject: Synaptix and it got me in. You wrote you were doing major in English and are new in Twine, do I remember correctly? If so, your formating looks much better than basic to me. I was a bit scared of the experiment [/spolier] so I cowardly fled, but I was positively impressed by the mass of text you produced. I logically went for collection as I am a bit of a collector myself and I ended up with a new specimen. I still need to try the main storyline though.
I have students (junior secondary) who enjoy learning creative writing in English through Twine and in our As I Sat on a Sunny Bank you can see some of their small experimenting with formating. What is your thesis?
The Goldilocks’ Principle by iris is a game about eating disorders and the voyeurism of people reading about this kinda stuff. It’s quite coy with its subject matter, asking its player to choose a “trigger warning” level from a 1 to 5 and taunting the player for choosing this level. The story is always the same, but the level of detail and presentation elements always differ. I found this framing device to be very clever since I became pretty self-conscious about why I’m reading this story and what it’s supposed to be doing to me. It feels like an invisible tug-of-war between the narrator and the player that I quite adore.
My only issue with the game is the timed text, but everything about this game is quite lovely and witty. I definitely recommend it to most people if they find this description of the game a little bit interesting.
Unfortunately, I’m not. Way too tired among other things. I actually got a flu while working on the game near the end of Spring Thing, and I have recently recovered from that. And since authors are encouraged not to write negative critiques, I don’t think I can find a way to heed to that while writing my own reviews.
And as mentioned here, I have a ton of other games to go through. A bunch of my friends on Itch has released visual novels, and it is my obligation as a good friend to play their games and offer my thoughts.
Without going too off-topic, I’ve not actually reviewed children’s literature before. But I did have a try on writing children’s fiction and take a class on it. That class was hard. I also sometimes will go into a mood and read picture books too. It’s just kinda fun.
English is my third language, actually. You can tell since I sometimes mix up tenses. I just read and write a lot while copying many people’s mannerisms. I also go out of my way to interact with people, both in speech and text. Languages are meant to be used after all.
That sounds busy. I had just 12 games to test, 4 were too buggy or too unfinished to let out. Even though there are no friends of mine who expect a review from me, I am playing this year as many as I can since I know how it feels when somebody plays mine.
Chronicles of Moorwakker
/by Jupp/
A role-play text genre is new to me (if I don’t count hours spent with my friends in a bus playing D&D just so - with no pen or paper). In this game I made it to the first fight with much stronger NPC at my homeplace after successfully escaping from being burried alive. I had to be carefull about taking choices since there is no go-back button to retrace false steps. Obvious thing, because it made my feeling of danger more immanent. My curiosity was instantly taken by background music and sounds. The feeling was of something “raw, crude and damp” which was congruent to the overall athmosphere of the game setting. I appreciate it since it helps me to dive in into the text and stay interested. So did the art - the bleaky style reminded me of “Krabat” by Karel Zeman (https://youtu.be/g1k86XfOToI?feature=shared), similarly authentic with a slight touch of punk extravagance. So to sum up, Jupp, as a player and much less experienced colleague author I really and thoroughly enjoyed being dragged into the raw universe of Moorwakker, despite the short life of my character. Thanks.
Thank you! This is my second twine game, as I did something tiny for a 48 hour game jam a little while ago, so I had a bit of an idea of how to handle it. I also read through several twine games + Melissa Ford’s Writing Interactive Fiction With Twine, which helped me manage to put everything together.
This project is not for a thesis, at my college that sort of thing is done within two semesters, and this was a one semester project. My concentration is creative writing, so I’ve used this independent study largely as a creative writing project, although I’ve also done some writing on my experience and learning from playing through some interactive fiction, and I’ll be putting together a short essay on my writing process.
Krabat & the Sorcerer’s Mill by Ottfried Preussler is one of my favourite children’s books. I must have read it four or five times. I don’t understand a word of the animated movie you’ve linked to, but I know the story by heart and I will just focus on the beautiful drawings.
This is my first year entering Spring Thing and I’m excited to be playing through the entries. I played For Lila and I was surprised that it got me in the feels - I have a kiddo now and suddenly I was like, heck yes, anything and everything for that little baby!! It did get me to reflect on how having a kid can change even a fantastical character’s life.. I played The Goldilocks Principle on my phone and suspect I might like it even more on desktop. I enjoyed the range of effects used to illustrate the road through recovery and relapse, and I welcomed the different entry points into the story. I played through all levels of triggering and was quite impressed.
I just finished blackberry bloodbath. What a crazy rollercoaster ride through the ages! I loved the 90s windows desktop presentation und the raw unfiltered writing.
Eudokimos is the tutor of a class of young people interested in IF. This is the third (?) year they’ve put together a collection of games under the name Senica Thing. Eudokimos lightly edits and proofreads these works, if I understand correctly.
It’s really interesting to see these enthousiastic people take their first steps toward making IF. I gather there are some works by more experienced students in this year’s collection, so I’m very curious.
The early writing collaborator for my submitted game (Succor, originally a game jam project) was a young science major in university taking an elective which covered interactive fiction, so he joined in for the jam and eventually made his own game inspired by some of the ideas a month later! The update is just me tinkering around alone because he’s off getting a PhD now - but I think it’s great that intfic creation has become so accessible that people from all walks can give it a try. I want the doctors and scientists of the world exploring creating! This is the power of art - it builds empathy and teaches us to view the world through multiple perspectives (especially in the case of intfic, where we’re literally forcing our brains to imagine multiple perspectives and scenarios!).
It’s so cool to hear that this kind of storytelling is getting more exposure. I think it adds value to the world! Especially in an era where creation feels so commoditized, it’s great to see people making stuff for the reward the process itself brings.
As Rovarsson said, you can find my team in the Back Garden under the title: As I Sat on a Sunny Bank. My daughter’s entry is the last one - I helped with the finale and with interactivity. Hope you like it. All 8 games are quite quick to run through.
So this is what the IF world calls parser. And it’s my second game of this kind I tried to play. I can’t imagine how demanding the code part is, but I liked the option to kiss from the very beginning and tried it on a couple of NPCs in random. I also took the warning and tried not to cut everybody in front of me . I am stuck now with the mage. I am sure I need to do precise thing before or after one of his spells, but for now let me stay there.
The gameplay reminded me of King’s quest adventure game which I played in early ninetees on Comodore. Some parts (pilgrims, thief) called in my memories of Howard’s Conan, both film and the books. The funniest moment? When the peddlar offered me the 5 items and suddenly a basket floated around. But I also liked fighting stark naked wizard .
I am proud still to have gotten that far with no cheats
Eudokimos (Wonder of the Woods, in As I Sat on a Sunny Bank , Back Garden, together with Leontine )
/
I am happy to have satisfied your sorcering hunger 
