An illustrated short children's story.
Alice E. Wells, Sia See and Jkj Yuio
I like it! It’s cute/cozy, great characters.
What’s working for me:
I like stories that are cute, wholesome, and kid-friendly without being saccharine, and I think Tin Mug threads the needle on this. There’s a Grimm’s quality to this story: The anthropomorphic kitchenware have real difficulties in life, and face some dire risks (being broken, discarded, forgotten). There are some wonderful dark ideas, like the colander that’s effectively got dementia “because he was full of holes.”
The character writing is very good. In particular, the human characters came through with different voices and feelings, and they have history beyond this incident.
What’s not working for me:
Some of the prose took me out of the moment, and certain imagery was weird enough to put me off too. “The tea ran through his veins and warmed his old bones” struck me as maybe more surreal than intended? There are also some small editing issues - missing punctuation, odd capitalization.
I didn’t always feel like I understood the mug’s objective, or how my choices contributed to them; this was mostly okay because it was a low-stakes experience, but I was more or less picking behaviors to roleplay the mug’s childlike personality, not thinking about the effect they might have on the world. (I fully expect a similar criticism to be leveraged at Esther’s.)
I played on mobile and had some technical and user experience issues. Having to drag the scrollbar to scroll on a touchscreen was annoying, and it came up a lot because new content always autoscrolled to the end and I had to scroll back to read it all. Also the radio-button-like choices are a little confusing. I kind of ended up double-tapping options to proceed, but was never quite sure what the intended interaction model was.
No credited playtesters.
Overall I like it very much! Great work!