I love Twine games that are able to create a strong sense of place. Despite being text-only, a beautiful typeface and atmospheric, well-selected words go beyond ‘choosing your own adventure’, to navigating vivid interconnected chambers. Kitty Horrorshow’s strange, oddly-lovely Hornets is vivid, all right.
Hornets is best described as a mystery: Burnished, apocalyptic sunsets reflect off the slick, jewel-like bodies of gigantic hornets, in a city run with blood. Where did they come from? You, however, seem to move fearlessly through the ruin of your town, through its holy spaces and shattered libraries, carefully piecing together what happened.
The text is a pleasure to read, and although you engage with Hornets‘ city of fresh tragedy and elegant decay in almost abstract snippets, its world feels fully-realized, haunted by the footprint of its temples, towers and gods.
Kitty Horrorshow’s Hornets is free to play in your browser, but the developer accepts support for her games through an optional button.