What’s the most ambitious Twine game you’ve ever played or seen? In terms of size, detail, complexity and so forth? Which Twine games would you say are the definitive Magnum Opus-es of the system? The most advanced? Envelope-pushing? Impactful? Just plain cool?
I’m honestly just asking because I’m trying to get a friend hooked on IF who is currently addicted to your standard console fare, lol. You know. Mario. Pikachu. Zelda. I think they’d actually love Twine, and Twine hybrid games. If they do, then I can have a buddy I know IRL who I can talk to about IF!
Alcyone probably is the most ambitious failure by now. The release date was to be 2019 but there were no devlogs since May. The demo already slows down Twine to a crawl. Still, it is very impressive.
The Master of the Land for me. I’d never seen anything like it in Twine when it came out, and it still wows me to this day, with its interface, storytelling and world modelling, and all round very ambitious approach to choice based IF.
I agree with Heretic’s Hope in particular. It’s odd that there has not been a lot of discussion about it in the forums so far during IFCOMP 2019. It is a polished and professional-looking game but I haven’t heard much about it at all.
Does it have to be twine, or just non-parser? If so, on top of the great suggestions already given, I’d also suggest the games produced by inkle which are long, good storylines, graphics, sound etc (80 days, heaven’s vault, sorcery!) And Fallen London. I also wouldn’t discount the shorter twine games. There’s so many that are worth reading.
Thanks for the recs. I’ve just played Cactus Blue Motel. Nice, atmospheric story. I liked how the choices gave enough freedom to feel like I was exploring the motel / game, but without inflicting stuckness on me.
I just finished buying and playing Open Sorcery today. It is a really great game. Definitely a new Twine favorite for me. I’m going to check out 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds next because I really like Abigail Corfman’s writing and storytelling.
It claims to be a Twine game but is it? I am not sure. But if it is, even as a demo, it is pretty impressive. I definitely would consider it highly ambitious and I look forward to the final game if it ever gets finished.
Would love to hear opinions and input from others on the demo.
I don’t know much about it, but a few results come up when you search for phaser+twine, and the game itself resembles sugar cube twine a lot (with links both as highlighted words and “next” buttons and a side menu of links).
Is there any way it could be both? Or is phaser just very similar to twine in functionality?
Phaser is a 2D graphics library that draws on 2D canvas. Easy to draw, easy to have 2D effects. But no text to copy or read through a speech synthesizer. If you open the browser console it says Phaser. Download the game from Itch and look at the code if you want to be sure.
“Railways of Love” is in Phaser, if you want another example. The insides are totally different.
Oh yeah, that does make sense, it does have that retro feel of “Railways of Love”. Could be a mix or something that used Twine for prototyping.
Whatever the case may be, I do see that there is no “Phaser” option on the IFDB. I imagine that the company that created the entry must have figured that “Twine” was the closest option.
So, yeah, probably not considered a true Twine game by any means. Still, a pretty cool looking game. Hopefully it will get finished soon.
I just finished playing and reviewing a great 2014 Twine game called (do not) forget. The game play is fairly simple, but the writing and ideas and music and graphics are definitely original and worth checking out:
It’s a fairly short and simple IF work, so I wouldn’t call it ambitious. It does, however, have an interesting UI and dialogue system that also provides the puzzling aspects to the game. I think the ideas have some real potential as a narrative device for a bigger story.
I haven’t seen anything quite like it in Twine, has anyone else?
I’m very fond of “16 Ways to Kill Vampires at McDonald’s”, myself. Few Twines have meaningful puzzles in them; 16 Ways has both excellent writing and excellent puzzles.
I haven’t played “16 Ways to Kill Vampires at McDonald’s” yet (on my to do list), but I did play that author’s other game, Open Sorcery, and it was a terrific game. Might want to check it out if you haven’t already. It’s not free but it was well worth the price for me.