#sarah willson

[thena0315]

[picturebookshelf]

Dora’s Halloween Adventure (2000)

Story: Sarah Willson -- Art: Steven Savitsky

[manonamora-if-reviews]

My Name Is Soda by Sarah Willson

A Single Choice Jam entry.

Entry - IFDB - More by Sarah CW: mention of death, alcoholism

A Conversion with a (Different kind of) Pop Ever met a drink or a food that could talk to you while you were ingesting it? Me either... but I feel like if I were at a low point in my life, I too would want a friendly ear (or well, voice) keeping me company and maybe even helping me through things. Because sometimes it's just easier to talk to an inanimate object than unload your feeling onto another being. But this soda is even more special: it is not only sentient, it can also remember thoughts and memories of people who drank soda before. Like your brother at his seventh birthday party, or you mother throughout her life (even though she claimed to hate them). Able to retell those memories to you (old or new), Soda tries to bring you comfort through what seems to be a hard time. Remind you you are not completely alone. Like soda, the entry is quite the saccharine coating over relatively darker themes, enhancing the contrasts between elements. Soda is cheery while you are a bit morose. It reminds you of better time when currently... it's really not great. It engages with you in ways you may not have been in a while (was there a hint of Covid in there?). The whole thing is very sweet.

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Sarah Willson’s “Closure: An ill-advised sad teen heist”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

Clever, well-implemented small game that exhibits the virtue of knowing what its boundaries are and not trying to be more than it is. You're a girl about to graduate from high school and have broken into your college-freshman recently-turned-ex-boyfriend's dorm room while he's known to be out for the afternoon, looking for a picture of the two of you together that you know he has and an explanation for why he recently dumped you. It's an exploration game (and, as the secondary title says, a heist), and it pulls it off well. The premise -- which rises above the level of being a simple gimmick, I think -- is that you're the protagonist's friend, lending moral support and direction to the heist, giving her instructions remotely in the same way that most parser IF has you giving instructions to the PC.

It's a short game, maybe a twenty to thirty minutes, and there are no real puzzles; Kira, the PC, comments on what she's finding and how she understands it, so there's not even the hermeneutic puzzle of piecing together the clues to form a theory. It makes up for it with excellent writing: voice and tone are on-point throughout the game, and the epiphany that Kira gradually has as she goes through her ex's room and sees their relationship from new angles is paced and managed very well. There's a gradual revelation about the ex, too, and that's also managed well throughout the game.

Aside from the clever parser positioning, there's nothing particularly unusual about the game, but it was a fun quick play. I'd like to see more from the author in the future.

My score: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)