Under Loch, by Mertie MacLeod
Under Loch gives an initial impression of being simple to the point of trollishness: a single straightforward Twine passage narrating a disappointing tourist trip to an artificial loch, with the only interactivity being a link at the bottom of the page that allows a bit of time to pass and cycles through a few small bits of color. After futzing around with that for a few times, it tells you that something might eventually happen if you come back later. And in fact it will! But getting into the what and how of that is quite spoiler-y, so here’s where those who haven’t played it yet (or who have and haven’t figured out the trick – don’t worry, it’s not too hard to suss out) should leave us.
So, as the alliterative authorial names (and matching email addresses, if you think to check) suggesting, Under Loch and Enkii are actually two parts of a single whole, one game split across two files, where you need to ping-pong from one to the other, advancing the plot and making choices for each in turn, in order to allow the other to progress through the next scene. This is pretty cool! We’ve seen this sort of thing before, like the obfuscated interconnections of 2020’s Knot games, where solving the final puzzle in each of three games required gathering information from the others (but the player wasn’t informed of that in advance), but actually I think the clearest reference point is the multiplayer Twine games Milo van Mesdag by Travis Moy from a couple of years ago: sure, the idea here is that you’re playing both games by yourself, but technically, it’s same approach of having decisions in one Twine game/tab picked up on and influencing another.
The two games have different color schemes and different initial vibes – unlike the peaceful opening scene of Under Loch, Enkii starts off in more of a thriller mode, with the latter game’s protagonist bent on blowing the whistle about corporate environmental malfeasance, before being trapped by an astonishing bit of bad luck. But once the two protagonists connect via walkie-talkie (the Under Loch protagonist has to help the Enkii one find a key that’s gone missing somewhere in the park in order to let her out of the control room she’s accidentally locked herself into) these differences are quickly blunted: the urgency of the Enkii-protagonist’s predicament injects a bit of tension into Under Loch’s peaceful scene, while the conversation between the two quickly turns lower-key and personal as they get to know each other during the search for the key, for the lack of anything better to do.
The author wisely keeps the prose, design, and plot straightforward, given the complexity of what’s going on under the hood and how the player winds up interfacing with it. The writing is always clear, perhaps a bit over-earnest, but never puts a foot wrong either, giving you immediate access to what each of the two main characters are thinking. Meanwhile, neither has much in the way of impactful decisions to make – there are a few options here and there, but they’re mostly just choosing slightly different topics of conversation or unremarked-upon reactions as the two chit-chat. And the game never goes much beyond the initial setup – I was actually hoping there’d be more details on the Enkii side on exactly what the company was doing that was so bad, and exactly what the protagonist’s plans were – save for one big narrative twist at the very end of the game. It’s admittedly a bit arbitrary, but I enjoyed having a second rug-pull moment to mirror the mechanical one, and it instantly made sense of a couple of small details that had been nagging at me since they seemed off.
But again, I think this comparative simplicity was a good call. The game is written in relatively short passages, so you need to jump back and forth between the tabs quite frequently. This foregrounds the game’s key strength, but also means that having distinctly different protagonists, each with a unique voice, or complex game mechanics, or too twisty of a plot, could have felt disorienting as you juddered your way through in a series of start-stop-start engagements. As it is, both Under Loch and Enkii go down easy, eliciting an impressed nod at how easy it makes its technical innovation work and a smile at how pleasant it is to spend a little bit of time with such nice characters. The games definitely land more as proofs of concept than as mature masterworks, but we need the former to get to the latter, after all.