intfiction.org

This is not a proper review but... here it goes:

Snake's Game

Perfect for mobile. It is amazing how pretty and usable is Inklewriter.

General: interesting world-building. Not very interactive, a pity. Great writing. Great gore. Interesting structure and world.

Definitively there's something interesting happening, however I could not grasp it yet in my playthroughs. But as I said, this could be more interactive in any way, with proper interaction in each of those branches. Take the example of the hell where we must cross above the putrid non-dead. If each step were interactive, the game would be more gripping and surprising instead of revealing everything at once with a wall of text.

Score: recommended with reservations.

I don't feel that I ever completely put all the pieces together on this one. It also seemed to be a Time Cave that required reading all the paths in order to figure out what was going on, which means that the player's later encounters with the work become more and more about rereading paths you've already been down in order to find their alternate outcomes, and that a partial encounter with the piece doesn't necessarily make for a very satisfying short story. There are probably ways to make even that work (even without a Ren'Py-style ability to fast forward through previously viewed scenes), but in this particular piece I found it rather frustrating.

Personally, I'm totally up for experiments where the player doesn't have a lot of agency over the plot. ("Not much plot-level agency" I think must be what you mean about "not very interactive"? there's lots of text variation, so I'd call it interactive in that sense.) I didn't get as much out of this one as I would have liked to do. It's possible that comp fatigue made it a little harder for me to get into, but I think the author's chosen structure inherently presents some non-trivial design challenges.

Inklewriter is absolutely wonderful on mobile. I wish the default output of Ink looked exactly like this. (Yes, I know, "LEARN CSS HANON.")

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Yes, it is Time Cave, but it is a very short piece. Just 3 to 5 static threads.

About not being very interactive, I mean that you can have any number of unaltered threads, but have them simulated in some way. A-la Inkle, who is my ideal kind of IF for CYOA (IMHO). You know, to have action in every step of the narration, no matter the outcome (like in Rameses). But Snake's Eyes, as others of the contest are little time caves with wall of texts. Or sometimes one one thread with interaction for pacing.

Definitively Snake's Eyes has not text variation at all.