Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Confessing to a Witch by HeckinRobin

Whether it's beautiful-beautiful, or Hallmark-beautiful, or actually in some sweet soft-Photoshopped stock image zone inbetween, the cover for 2022 Autumnal Jumble Back Garden entry Confessing to a Witch (by HeckinRobin) made me sit up straight. I generally like witch subject matter and I often begin a festival or comp with something short. This game fits those bills, being both a Twine piece and a demo.

The game is narrated in the first person by a girl who's setting out to confess her romantic feelings to her friend Juniper Merryweather. Juniper's "a talented witch with a bright future ahead", a line that tells players a lot about the gameworld. The presentation is of an attractive click-to-proceed kind, with a saturated autumnal photo of the scenery on each page and a well chosen ambience of background music. I found the combination of the narrator's building nervousness in the prose and the inexorable first person visual trek towards the house (through a forest, over a bridge, towards the house, etc.) to be surprisingly effective. "Surprisingly" makes it sound like I expected there to be something wrong; the surprise for me was simply that even without a parser, this presentation took me back to the earliest graphic adventure games. The way they used graphics showing each scene in the first person.

The author gently mocks her own Photoshop/stock-image-wielding skills in some post-demo text, but I think the choices they've made are good. The images they've edited to incorporate fantastic elements have a high contrast, lolly-coloured aesthetic that sold this witch world to me. It's perhaps also helpful that the images aren't filling the screen. As postcards on a black background, they're working. The accompanying background music has a strolling-through-the-woods piano plinkiness combined with some low held chord menace and tension. Again, well chosen.

Without spoiling anything, all's not well with Juniper when the narrator arrives at her house. This is the setup for what the author says will be a text-based adventure with original art. Narratively, the stage has been set, and would still have been set had the game consisted only of the prose, so that's a good sign. If the game retains the mysterious, slightly tense and pendingly romantic tone the demo achieves, it should come out well.