Wynter's Spring, 2025

[Wynter]

Congratulations to all the authors! I don’t know how many games I will get through, but I will certainly play most of the choice-based ones.

Interview Interview, by Ronynn

As the veteran of many disappointing job interviews, I was attracted to this one first. Of course, there is more than one kind of interview in life. Without giving too much away, this one begins with a surreal red carpet interview before moving on to the more mundane sort. But it plays with reality more than I was expecting, and in more surreal ways: I was eager to keep reading and see where it would take me. There was a pleasingly high number of choices to be made, and I want to replay to how characters will react when I give different answers. One note: in the scene with the woman, it would be helpful to have more “I say/she says” dialogue tags as it’s sometimes slightly unclear who is speaking.

First time, I played it fairly realistically, giving sensible answers, but also with a lack of self-certainty; I’d like to play it a bit more wackily next time.

[spoiler]Statistics

Professionalism: 8/15

Honesty: 6/15

Ridiculousness: 2/15

Cringe Amorous Behavior:0/18

Achievements

Achievements stay hidden unless you won the achievement.

• The Professional:
• Truther:
• You … Really:
• Gym Chapter Achievement:

[Wynter]

Blackberry Bloodbath by Melany Socorro

The first thing that jumps out from this is the fantastic graphics: the online notepad and chat of a teenage girl in the late 90s/2000s. The computer interface is perfect, the colours warm and inviting, but helpfully show the passage of time, and the sidebar icons give different responses when you click on them in different chapters (I didn’t realise this until another reviewer mentioned it, and I replayed). The music on the CD player is a nice extra touch, too.

Each chapter is mostly written in the form of teenage-girl poetry, which sounds real and authentic. Although it’s only a short game, each chapter takes a different event from a different year in the protagonist’s life. When I played it first, it didn’t seem that there were that many branching points, but when I went back and replayed, I realised that there were plenty, and that they take the character off in a number of different directions. A sad, thoughtful, believable and visually appealing tale that does a lot in a short gameplay.

[Note: another reviewer has pointed out the overlaid text in the ‘whisky sours’ section; there’s also something up with the ‘Doodles’ icon in the option where you pick two beers - it gives two bits of text at once.]

[Wynter]

Test Subject: Synaptix by Mkellygames

This was great. A believable situation (a character desperate to earn a bit of extra money) in a future which may not be too far away: one where most jobs are done by robots, and most people are living precariously. Images of people on a website are computer-generated rather than real; people have temporary tattoos to confuse facial recognition software. There are several nice little observations on life in this world:

It’s pointless, making the effort to write your name neatly and with flair when you’re writing with your finger on a touch-pad, but you do it every time. Maybe people need small, pointless things to feel proud of.

The age of human art has ended, and what came before means nothing.

There are two main areas of choice for the reader: a choice of three different reasons why you want to earn extra money (a dog requiring medical care; a bad living situation; a hobby), and the different choices for how you act, leading to one of a few different endings. The former of the two doesn’t exactly change the outcome, but it’s a nice touch: your decisions make the game is more interesting upon replay, and it affects the strange dreams that you have when you are under the influence of the test drug. These are some of the most sinister passages in the game, and it’s worth playing all three versions (dog/roommates/hobby) to get the full effect.

[Wynter]

The Goldilocks Principle by iris

This one is simple, but it grew on me.

A very short Twine story that somehow becomes more poignant by being short, and by being four different stories. Although we know little about the character’s life, the sparse telling hints at her struggles, and the game sometimes fills the screen, overwhelmingly, with text. The story is an example of how effective Twine’s click-text functions can be - the reader has to keep clicking, repetitively, cycling between the same words, compulsively adding extra text, never quite right - a perfect style for the subject matter. I didn’t read version 1 first (“This wasn’t your first choice, was it?”) and it is all the sadder for being so perfunctory after having read version 5.

[Wynter]

As the Fire Dies by Alex Carey and Deborah Chantson

This was enchanting. The game begins by asking your name, relationship status, whether you have children, and if you fear death. None of this comes up again, but the last question does set the tone a little: what horrors, mysteries or enlightenment will be found here?

You find yourself lying beside a fire on a starlit night, beside a forest, and your only task is to feed the flames. And then you sleep …

You find yourself in a dreamworld made up of strange images. A tree that turns out to be made of bones. A distorted mechanical model of the solar system. A giant, knitting a sweater. As you observe the world around you, you interact with it, solving puzzles, and moving the story onward, until you emerge in another dreamworld. But your time spent in each is strictly limited: you can’t let the fire die, back in the real world, or you will die too.

Writing open-ended puzzles in Twine is always a challenge, because a parser game puts the onus on the player to figure out what to do next, whereas choice-based games, with their link text, essentially tell you what your options are. The way to provide a bit of a challenge is to require the player to complete the right actions in a certain number of turns, or to flood them with so many options that finding the right path is difficult. Although this is a short game, I think it does a good job at making you think about what the right action is, and in the later rounds, I did find myself getting stuck quite a few times. The bizarreness of the dream logic meant that it’s not always possible to figure out rationally what the best next step is. But I loved the thoughtfulness behind the dreamworlds, the places the story got me to imagine, the dreamy atmosphere. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to write myself sometime.

Edit: something I was going to write and then forgot was that this reminded me a little of A. D. Jansen’s Eidolon, which has a similar dreamlike atmosphere but is considerably longer and is worth checking out if you have time to spare

[Wynter]

The Sandman by Bellamy Briks

I’ve not finished playing this one, but I thought I’d review it anyway, given that I’ve had a couple of serious goes at it, and it’s not had many reviews yet. Also, because I think it pairs nicely with the previous game, as both are centred on the idea of sleep, but in diametrically opposite ways.

A very professional-looking Twine game, complete with graphics and a soundtrack which, during the gameplay, is just enough to be atmospheric (a kind of repetitive, haunting moaning in the background; tingly sound effects when you pick any options). It reminded me vaguely of The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo: a sinister atmosphere produced by dark graphics and minimalist sound effects; various options that you have to click on; a gameplay divided into time periods.

Unlike As the Fire Dies, in this game, the goal is not to fall asleep, as a virus has taken over the world: if you fall asleep, you will not wake up. The main character (the default name is Veronica, but you can choose) has travelled with her children to some kind of institute where she believes the virus will be cured, but instead she just finds a single old man whose identity is not disclosed, at least to begin with. On each day, you are given three actions, usually to keep yourself awake, to keep each of your children awake, or to talk to the man: these are philosophical conversations about the meaning of life, the afterlife, and so on. There are various options for these, and in some cases you can type in your own responses, but I’m not sure to what extent these affect your progress. If you don’t pick the right options, then you, or one of the others, will fall asleep forever. On my best playing, I got as far as Day 11, the only one left, and had no more option but to sleep. If you have a few conversations with the man, you find out things about both your pasts; I suspect that there is some kind of big reveal if you manage to keep him alive for longer than I did.

I don’t know if the relative lack of reviews is because few people have played this game, or because they are simply waiting to finish it before reviewing; if the former, I would definitely suggest giving it a go.

[Wynter]

Three-Card Reading by Norbez Jones

This was made in Twine, but with no choices to make, so it’s more of a short story than a game, with very effective graphics showing who is speaking at any given time. An interesting innovation is that you can decide whether to let the story autoplay - voices read out the text, and the speech bubbles run along with them - or click through the speech bubbles in your own time, with no audio. Personally, I prefer the latter, but it’s good that both preferences are accommodated.

Three friends meet in an autumnal woodland for a spooky afternoon, and one is doing a tarot reading for the others. My knowledge of tarot goes no deeper than a) the cards used in Curses, and b) the first episode of Father Ted where the fortune teller draws the Death card three times in a row, so I was grateful for the explanation of the three-card reading. But something is off with this friend: why do they seem to have been in more than one place at a time? And, as the closing words make clear, what are the implications for the narrator?

It’s a brief tale, and I think the big reveal and the final lines would make an interesting premise for a longer game. I should note, though, that this is a mini-sequel to a game I have not played, so maybe there’s some context I’m missing. Either way, a gorgeous-looking, well-made little piece.

[Wynter]

A Bottle from the Future by SKIT

A short Twine game about a narrator who goes down to the sea one day and sees a bottle with a message in it, washed up on the shore. Instead of being a fun activity, the idea of opening the bottle fills the narrator with trepidation: it seems to contain knowledge of their own fate. I’m curious to know why the narrator is so certain that the bottle contains great power, and I think the story could play with this idea a bit more. Does the bottle fill the narrator with a sense of dread, even a foreboding of evil, when they pick it up? Or are they in a state of mind where they believe that any action they take, however small, is of great consequence, that they will have a terrible effect on the world around them?

The text is set against background graphics. I felt that the opening background didn’t fit the beginning of the text: something more placid, like a beach on a sunny day, would have been more appropriate, with the red mushroom cloud being more suitable later in the story, depending on the choices you make.

I played through a couple of different choices before I took the right path and found out who had sent the message: this felt satisfying; it was nice that I had to work a little to discover what the story was really about. In a novel twist for an IF, I got a little test on what I had read, which linked an ancient myth to the great problems of today.