Saturday, October 8, 2016

Moonland (review)

"Moonland" is a Twine game written by BillyJaden for the 2016 Interactive Fiction competion. The last two games I reviewed I had chosen because I already had preconceptions I would enjoy them. This I chose because I had no preconceptions. I picked it from the top of a random list.

This felt like the sort of work one might hear at a goth poetry open mike night, although it has been about a quarter century since I lived in Seattle and remember attending such a thing. The story focuses on a romantic relationship between the narrative "you" and some other person. One or both of you are emotionally disturbed, and one of you could be an android. Or maybe that android thing was just a metaphor.

Text transitions were sometimes too fast, causing me to miss bits of the story. I don't think that mattered. Mostly it is impressionistic. Text spills across the screen like a word soup of mixed metaphors,
Following are examples:

"Wasps crawl out of her mouth, exploding in your face, dripping mud, wet neon-black tears fill your stomach."

"There is an electric recoil screaming through your body. You cringe, taking deep breaths to pull yourself together."

"You vomit like a rainbow."

The story comes with an audio track, though to me the music choice was the audio equivalent of a strobe light. The music reinforced my sense of this as an open-mike night experience.

Maybe someone with different interests will get more out of this game than I did.

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