2013-01-07

Twine GameStory Recommendations I

Here are some Twine stories that demonstrate what skilled authors can do with Twine. These examples are selected to show some of the many story types or narrative structures that can be created with Twine. These are reviews that might contain minimal spoilers.

CYBERQUEEN by Porpentine
Transhuman. Surgical horror. Some good time-based visual text effects. The writing is very atmospheric and keeps shifting reality. When reality stablises I'm not sure you're happy with the result.
Minimum playtime: 15 mins

Stygia by Kitty Horrorshow
It's a grittier Monsters Inc for adults... hang on, it's a horror themed afterlife. Well written with a setting and backstory suited for a movie. Limited replayability but you won't mind.
Minimum playtime: 10mins

Cold Dead Fish by Chris Klimas
Chris is the creator of Twine. This story is rather linear with only a few choices that really matter. Much of Twine's capability is used to "chunk" the story into unfolding bites that allow for contemplation and re-reading time as the reader explores the parenthetical links. These asides are interesting to the setting, but would have choked the narrative if the story was strictly serial. The subject of the story is a gentleman and an enigmatic lady.
Minimum playtime: 15mins

Fake Nerd Girl Detector by Zoe Quinn
Twine used instead of a flow-chart. This technique allows more space to make an argument and allows the author to keep the ending a surprise.
Minimum playtime: 5mins - some replayability in exploring the various endings

Choose Your Own Anna Anthropy Interview by Cara Ellison
This one is a hypertext arrangement of an interview with Anna Anthropy. If you're familiar with Anna's work you can skip most of the "asides". If you're interested in Anna's take on something in particular then you can read that. The format enables more indepth and richly annotated interviews than an equivalent serial article could.
Minimum playtime: 5mins - though you could easily spend more time if the subject matter interests you

Time Quest by Dungeon Smash
This choose your own adventure is sophomoronically funny. You get to trip around time and even postulate on the nature of time itself. Twine is very easily suited to make these kinds of stories.
Minimum playtime: 10mins

That's it for this round-up. Until next time (undetermined), maybe you can check out my Twine conversions of some old text games.

1 comment:

  1. thanks so much for including Stygia! Great games all around <3

    ReplyDelete