The Kuolema (Twine Edition), by Ben Jackson
A year and three weeks ago, I said:
even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking “[the Kuolema] would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine”.
It works just as well, and is smoother, in Twine!
…okay, the work the author has put into updating the game deserves a little more than that, but unlike my takeaway from One King to Loot Them All, where choosing between the Inform or Twine versions came down to a matter of taste, this is a clear upgrade all around. The Google Forms original pulled out some clever tricks to deal with the fact that that system was never designed for games – including not having any state tracking – but the Twine version is unencumbered by those awkward contrivances: the full game is all in one file, rather than being split between three password-gated ones, inventory and notes are easily available in a sidebar, along with a save-and-load feature, and the presentation has gotten an across-the-board upgrade including some attractive typography and graphic design. Puzzles do still require you to type the name of the object you’re using, the password you’re trying, or what you’re looking for into a text box, but I enjoyed this hold-over: the sidebar allows you to easily refer back to items and info you’ve collected to date, and the type-in requirement means you have to think a bit about what you’re trying to do, rather than just lawnmower through links.
There’ve also been some improvements to the meat of the story. The general shape of the narrative remains the same, but while I didn’t go back to compare things line by line, I remembered seeing some typos and clumsy phrases in the original prose that I didn’t pick up on this time out (I just saw one misspelling: “metalic” for “metallic”). There’ve been a couple of alternate solutions added to puzzles that perhaps felt a bit out-of-context in the initial iteration, and the endgame has seen some expansion – my sense was that the climactic conversation has been substantially fleshed out, and takes advantage of the game’s newfound ability to remember actions you took earlier in the story, while the set of factions you can potentially ally with has been expanded, with accompanying options seeded earlier in the game to set up those possibilities. It’s still recognizably the same pulp sci-fi thriller, but it’s got a bit more heft to it and the central character of Dr. Vrieman has some more psychological plausibility.
The game does include “AI” generated art, alongside hand-made graphics for the puzzle-relevant visuals and documents. As I’ve mentioned before, I am generally down on such things, but kudos to to the author for handling this well: using such tools wasn’t such a hot-button in 2022, when the game began its gestation, and their use is fully disclosed, with a post-victory survey even enabling players to weigh in on how they felt about their presence in the game. I still don’t like seeing them – and I personally don’t think they add much to the game, it would work just as well with the gameplay-relevant graphics being the only ones – but this helped take the sting out.
I suppose the Google Forms version does still retain some novelty value, and future players might enjoy checking it out just to see how far one can torture the system, but the Twine version is very much the definitive edition of what, per my 2023 review, was already a heck of a good time. Nice job, year-ago-Mike, you were spot on!