Happy Spring Thing, everyone! Congratulations to all the authors. I don’t expect to play all of the games, and will probably focus on Twines.
9 Likes
23 Minutes
A stream-of-consciousness narrative of a teacher walking to work. You click the mouse or press the space bar to prompt the next line; the background is a constantly shifting reel of out-of-focus photos from the London streets. As a Londoner I found myself wondering where the photos were taken!
The narrator’s thoughts are a jumble of his present reality as he walks down the street, his plans for the day ahead, song lyrics, broccoli, introspection, worries about his baby daughter and his sleeplessness, slogans, his relationship with his partner, Tesco, and his relationship with his own father. Out of this comes a story about something more serious underlying the fights he has had with his partner.
The interactive part is that the reader needs to click for each line of the story: in general I felt that this was well fitted to it, but maybe the story was a little too long and meandering for this reading mode. The use of more than one column of text was used effectively to allow two things to run through the narrator’s mind.
6 Likes
A Quiet Scurry
The opening of this short Twine sounds a little bit like a children’s picture book, except the first important word is “violence”:
In the violence of the world sits a field full of wheat.
In the sharpness of the wheat sits a small woven ball.
In the curves of the small woven ball sits a tiny little mouse.
You are a harvest mouse, and your task is to get through the night, find something to eat and drink without attracting predators, and then find somewhere to curl up and sleep for the day.
The mouse and its environment are described beautifully, but it is a vulnerable creature in a dangerous world: there are various other creatures, mostly hostile, threatening you. Most of the endings I found led to being eaten by another animal or squashed by a car . On at least one occasion I ended by finding a safe place to sleep for the day. But even then the mouse will have to do the same again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.
It’s a very short little game, but very effective: I think I did get an insight into the constant fear of what it is like to be a harvest mouse.
7 Likes
Enigmart
Oh, this was just wonderful. I had a great time with this.
You need to go to the supermarket for milk, and possibly some MagiMuffins. Except this is no ordinary supermarket! Enigmart has an app which will give you generous discounts - so far, so 2026, except here you have to solve puzzles to get your 25% off.
The puzzles, mostly food-themed, were great - mostly pitched at the right level to get my brain going without being too hard. I had to come back to some of them and think again (the Creatine Crunch cereal was maddening until the penny suddenly dropped). And every one gave me that wonderful sense of satisfaction when I figured it out. A hint system is offered relatively late on in the game - I needed to use it twice (Rainbow Colour Cubes, where I wasn’t sure I understood the puzzle, and Mystery Yoghurt, where I failed to understand that I was supposed to think of fictional detectives’ names, although that one was difficult to get going on).
There is a subgenre of IF which deals in wordplay and puzzles, and this is a worthy addition to it. Well done!
9 Likes