by Milo van Mesdag. 11th place, IFComp 2022.

I loved this! It’s ambitious and well-executed and I haven’t even tried the two-player experience yet. I found a handful of minor bugs (which I’ve sent along to the author and could be fixed by the time you reach it) but really this is my favorite work I’ve played in a long time and I’m way way into it.

I had a lot of fun with The Last Night of Alexisgrad last year even though I thought it had some issues (in fact I’ve spent much of the last year working on my own two-player Twine game because of it, which is probably still 6-12 months from release). But A Chinese Room is on another level. The writing itself is great. I got that feeling I get when I read an author’s early work, and then jump to something 15 years later in their career and they’ve obviously gotten a lot better at their craft. Anyway, I’ve only played it through once, Caroline’s story, single-player, but I absolutely loved it. I’ll be grabbing a friend to go through it a second time as soon as possible.

This description, clearly on a path not everyone will see:

The room was designed for sound, but it is the light which you immediately notice. It’s everywhere, made grand with golden opulence and soft by crimson velvet hangings. It is as if someone has painstakingly chipped away a hundred years of darkness to reveal the true splendour of the glorious past.

is such a marvelous image of a theater.

There are effective uses of the Twine medium in particular in here. The “Then you were… Then you were…” passage as a fast-forward scene was super-effective, and replacing links like the ones you close on (“Go to bed. Go to sleep.”) produced a type of interiority that feels native to Twine/hypertext.

There are at least three major characters with surprising depth, most of all Caroline herself, and a good-sized supporting cast of interesting and distinct personalities. Choices have context and seem meaningful and give the illusion of significantly diverting the plot (or maybe they really do! I haven’t tested the boundaries yet).

I’m going to spend a lot more time on this, particularly playing through with a friend and experiencing the other side of the story. But for a 2-hour comp impression - wow!