Enjoyed Saltwrack!
I haven't been playing much of IFComp 2025 - I can't say that it's primarily because of their wierd (lack of) LLM policy, but it contributes. However Bruno has been covering several a day at random, and one of his recent posts influenced me to play Saltwrack, a Twine about journeying across an unusual post-apocalyptic world.
I have no idea how variable this game is - I don't have enough time to play it a second time and also still write this blog post - but there's clearly some variance here affected by your decisionmaking, causing consequences as heavy as who lives and who dies. Decision signposting ("you are about to make a decision!") is relatively clear, aside from a small number of scenes where it wasn't clear to me whether clicking a mid-paragraph link would trigger a choice. (This is my personal Twine bugbear, lmao.) But it's hitting at a higher average in this area than most stories I play. It is an extremely well-polished project and it's clear that a lot of time and love went into it.
I found the writing effective. The apocalypse it describes is very unusual - some kind of salty, extremophile-themed math/science horror world. I like that kind of thing! You play as a kind of researcher, plumbing the depths of madness at the center of the apocalypse.
I appreciated that the game disguised/bookended its storylet variance in such a way that it did feel like a mostly completely natural linear tale, presentation-wise. There is a bit of Oregon Trail-adjacent UI at the top of the screen, and most new storylets begin on a new page of text... but they don't all. The passages often combine the resolving emotion of the previous scene with the building tension of the next, which is a level of additional polish I don't always see in games like this. Some of these storylets seem to have strongly differing outcomes, so this might have required a good amount of work.
I did feel when I finished the game that I'd failed to uncover maybe the most thematically or informationally potent ending - something about my experience felt like I might have missed something, but I wasn't sure. I did get an ending, and the ending did feel thematically considered... but the state of affairs depicted in that ending was one where my character was having a somewhat muted experience of unresolved horrors. I doubt that this is the most cathartic or tremendous ending available... but again, without playing it several more times, I can't be sure.
I have written twines where I was stuck writing endings that felt both like "not the best ending" - intentionally - and thematically complete. It's sometimes very hard to do, particularly if you're telling a story - like Saltwrack - about people on a quest to achieve discovery or realization.
I don't yet know whether I consider it to always be a failure to tell a story which ends up in a place like that. I am however wondering whether the author should have pushed my particular ending even further in the horror or suffering direction.
Anyway, I recommend it! Worth checking out. I am not sure I am going to do a deep dive into this IFComp, but when I saw Bruno recommend it, I was intrigued!