Truck Quest: The cutting edge of 201X

When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest, we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected to.

  

Although the Guy Fawkes mask was an obvious idea, it wasn’t a good fit for our paranoid activist. There’s no way his efforts to undermine exploitative globalization would use a mass produced commodity that generated revenue for a major entertainment conglomerate! Samson might have had some unusual opinions about how society should work, but he wasn’t an idiot.

Instead, we looked at some of 2018’s cutting-edge solutions for remaining unrecognized: 

• Anti-identification glasses. Abstract patterns printed on cheap plastic frames. 
• Extreme makeup. People were providing advice in YouTube tutorials. 
• Custom software filters. (This was the least interesting solution, from an artwork perspective.) 
• Hyperface clothing. For overwhelming systems with too many false positives.  

Samson ended up with several different disguises to remain incognito.

Robust Action: A Thursday in Space Retrospective

“Single actions can be moves in many games at once.”

That’s John Padgett and Christopher Ansell describing robust action, the mechanism that the Medici family used to retain power in 15th century Venice. (Xavier Marquez also writes that robust action was how Francisco Franco managed adversarial factions in the 20th century.) 

TL,DR: When there’s more than one reason to do something, it’s more likely to get done. That’s true whether you’re manipulating political rivals or giving time and attention to the ideas in your own unruly brain. 

It’s why Donald and I participated in the 2023 Neo-Twiny Jam.

Why we did it

Our goals were: 

• Publish a game in 2023
• Develop mechanics that could be implemented elsewhere
• Apply novel constraints to inspire creativity
• Reach a larger audience through the game jam community

Making a public commitment to the game jam held us accountable. Participation was also linked with donations to an anti-hate group, which was a nice bonus.

How we did it

The jam’s 500-word limit was around the length of an in-depth blog post. That gave us room for an introduction, a conclusion, and 3 to 5 decision points that could be 70 to 100 words each, depending on how many choices we provided. 

We wanted the experience to feel like being an Amazon driver in space, and Donald’s artwork did a lot of the heavy lifting to reduce wordcount. He spent time googling images of tug boat galleys for reference, working to establish the cramped environment of the ship along with its worn and threadbare equipment

This was the first time our projects used Clip Studio Paint, and the short time frame forced Donald to learn the program quickly. The claustrophobic reference images started getting to him, but the end result constrains the player within a cramped world. 

Following Emily Short’s recommendation for writing the through line first, we put together a linear story that had 5 choices. Then we broke up the story to present the first 4 choices in any order — the Good Place approach of “taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it” — which made each playthrough a bit different. 

We used one MS Word document to track the wordcount in our display text, and a separate Word document held design notes and lists of things to do. As we got closer to the game’s release date, we did more coordinating via Discord messages. Not very sophisticated, but everyone has their own approach.

Thursday in Space involved more CSS work than our previous games. The sidebar uses Terminal with Scan Lines code created by Patrick Himes, and custom work was done for the borders and rounded edges on the buttons at the end of every passage. Code randomly set each button’s destination passage by using pluck to pull from an array of the unread passages. When every passage was removed, the button sent players to the final choice. 

There were 24 different ways to get through the story, which meant that we had to rein in combinatorial explosion by making some choices less meaningful than others. The random order also made it more difficult to test things properly. (Some players have reported that the stowaway doesn’t behave consistently, which is a bug I haven’t been able to fix.)

How it turned out

We accomplished a decent number of our goals.

• Publish a game in 2023

A clear win, in line with the eternally relevant gamedev advice of making and releasing lots of small games to develop your skills. 

• Develop mechanics that could be implemented elsewhere

Another win, using CodePen and experimenting with new ways for storylets to work together.

• Apply novel constraints to inspire creativity

On the one hand, the Neo-Twiny jam gave us the focus that we needed to accomplish the first two goals. On the other hand, some of the choices in this story felt less meaningful than others, which the audience noticed. 

• Reach a larger audience through the game jam community

This didn’t go so well. Sorting the jam entries by popularity puts Thursday in Space in the bottom 20% of entrants. 

Consolation prize: We realized that we could re-use assets from Project Arcmor, our game from 2021, and then we linked to it as an easter egg inside Thursday, in space. 

Applying and Improving 3 Types of Narrative Choices

I'd like to preserve some information that’s at risk of being destroyed by capricious billionaires: Ryan Kaufman's brief list of narrative choices.

Choices to access content 

Extreme versions are just “choose ‘yes’ to continue.” (See also: Dragon Warrior’s infamous “But thou must!”) 

Less extreme versions gate off side content — something like asking the player if they would enjoy a game of chess. Kaufman noted that most players don’t get much value from choosing NOT to do something. 

Instead, these choices can become opportunities to provide an "active no" that reveals additional details about a story and its characters: 

Choices to express an opinion

I’m ambivalent about reflective choices — asking players how they feel about things — because I can’t think of any times when they improved my enjoyment of a game. Cat Manning has explained that it takes an awful lot of work to do them well. 

On Twitter, Kaufman also pointed out that there are risks involved:

The worst abuses are authors using “how do you feel about this?” in place of “choose ‘yes’ to continue.” The story moves forward on rails regardless of how the player feels about it.

Kaufman’s recommendation was to link these choices with actual changes in the narrative, possibly adjusting the character’s inventory or abilities to reflect their answer.

Choices for a secret, third thing

My favorite segment was the choice to keep another character’s secret. This happens in Outer Worlds, where the main character has several opportunities to turn Phineas Welles over to the authorities. (That game had some problems, but choosing to reveal the location of Welles’ base had significant implications for the story and the main character’s role in it.)

Kaufman pointed out that these choices should be introduced early, because the decision to reveal a secret has more emotional weight if the player has been keeping it for a while. 

Building on these choices can add new dimensions to a narrative, especially when the different types of choices are connected. Choosing to keep a secret can lead to follow-up choices that ask how a player feels about their actions. 

Are they the type of character who will go to extreme lengths to help a friend, or will they abandon a friendship to adhere to a strict moral code? 

Learn to Test

I used to think it was silly when shows had futuristic computers narrate what they were doing. 

You know, those little stream-of-consciousness declarations, like “scanning the area for life forms” or “initiating self-destruct sequence”? They seemed like cheap writing trying show the audience that things were happening.

Now that I have more programming experience, it makes more sense.

My early coding efforts — in Twine, so we aren’t even talking about something complicated — were nightmares of frustration filled with obscure error messages and opaque syntax warnings. Early versions of the SugarCube documentation didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it was slow going trying to sift through Q&A pages for answers.¹

It was easier to loiter in the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, where I found Linus Åkesson² sharing a useful metaphor about building bridges. It's okay to start with something feeble, because you can build on it through a gradual process of refinement and evolution. 

As I beat various projects into shape — leaning on the bridge metaphor and applying McDonald’s Theory — I learned the four possible states in which code exists:

My coding efforts are still full of errors and janky syntax, but now it’s easier to find and fix the problems. If my projects need less development time, it’s not because I’m faster at coding. It’s because I’m faster at identifying where things failed. I have become better at testing. 

These improvements came from using more comments in the code and indicators that explain what's going on. When it's easier to see where things are failing, it's easier to identify where you should fix them. 

In that context, it makes more sense to have the computer announce that it’s scanning for lifeforms or initiating a self-destruct sequence.

1. I should note that Twinery.org is much more user friendly in the present day.

2. You may recognize his name from the “8-bit Baroque Metal” performance that recently took certain corners of the internet by storm.³

3. That wasn’t an intentional pun, but it works. SORRY I’M NOT SORRY.

Questioning my reactions

 

I came of age in the internet forums of the early 2000’s, and it was a time when posters were expected to follow a forum rules — whether those rules were written or otherwise. Ignorance was no excuse, and anybody who failed to demonstrate a mastery of “obvious” common knowledge was assaulted with lurk moar memes, encouraging them to study community etiquette before posting again. 

It… wasn’t the healthiest environment for advancing collective knowledge and shared understanding?

The norms of online discourse shifted over time, especially after Twitter became a major platform. I wouldn’t use words like “welcoming” or “inclusive” to describe the average Twitter user, but it became acceptable to go around posting while ignorant on main. 

Then Dick Clark died, and ignorance had a bit of a moment. It took things to the other extreme. 

There has to be a middle ground between communities where people are pressured to hide what they don’t know and ones where people make a big show of patting themselves on the back for not knowing anything. 

Asking questions is good! It’s how a person learns, but it can also encourage inquiry and discovery among larger groups of people. Two examples come from the Interactive Fiction Community Forum:

• There was a search for Film at Eleven, a text adventure from two decades ago, that brought the game to the attention of other community members who missed it the first time around. 
• LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup used to be a game that “everyone” knew about, but that is no longer the case. A conversation about its hidden treasures and optional endings brought it back into the public eye.  

In the current internet environment, the ability to ask questions has become much more important. News is secured behind paywalls, search results are poisoned by paid ads, and platforms like Discord make it almost impossible to find interactions from just a few months ago.

I need to reconsider how I respond to ignorance. (And to be clear, I mean honest lack-of-knowledge ignorance — I remain comfortable with my reflexive desire to spurn poorly disguised bigotry, intolerance, and hatred.)

If I’m going to “be the change I want to see” on the internet, supporting and encouraging people who want to develop new knowledge, then I’ll have to put aside the survival instincts that I developed in my early internet days. 

Blood Island: IFcomp 2022

Blood Island is a choice-based IFcomp 2022 entry by Billy Krolick that describes itself as a “philosophical Dating Sim turned Slasher.” 

Blood Island strikes an interesting spot at the intersection between reality shows and self-aware slasher films. They both involve performances from actors who intend to be observed, and this work was an opportunity to ask readers how their own performances might change in the presence of an audience. 

However, it might have been helpful to let the readers ask that question themselves. This Choicescript story interrogates readers after almost every passage.

 

• How do you feel about reality shows?

• How do you feel about slasher movies? 

• How do you feel about Final Girl Theory? 

Blood Island asked me how I felt about things so frequently that I never had a chance to develop those feelings. The topics switched so rapidly from concepts outside the story to dynamics within the narrative that I was left on uncertain footing. 

I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to answer these questions as a character or as the player controlling that character, which left me over-thinking everything: did I need to avoid a killer, or did I need to avoid a killer who was constrained by the rules of slasher films, or did I need to pay less attention to reflective choices so that I could get further into the story?

My obsession with giving the “right” answers prevented me from enjoying the descriptions, which were howlingly funny in several places. 

I enjoyed the concept, and I had fun with the atmosphere, but the overall implementation was… questionable.

(I’ll see myself out.)

Headights: IFcomp 2022

Headlights is a parser-based work by Jordan White entered into IFcomp 2022. It was created with Perplexity. 

The action in Headlights consists of looking at everything to find items that can open new locations. It relies on an artificial sense of urgency, continually telling players to hurry, that is not supported by any gameplay mechanics. Mostly, these reminders drew my attention to the lag between typing a command and receiving a response. 

There’s no real “search” command with Perplexity — an object’s notable features are revealed when you look at it. The default state of objects involves less description, which led to an infuriating encounter with “a bush, a bush, and a tree.” (You couldn’t look directly at either bush, because the parser didn’t understand which bush you wanted to check, but “look at bushes” eventually revealed that each bush had its own identifying adjective.)  

Overall, Headlights felt more focused than Kidney Kwest, the last Perplexity game I encountered. Most of the experience involved looking at objects and applying them logically to move to the next location. I particularly enjoyed the puzzle that involved a surge of adrenaline, because it did an unusually good job of using a narrative to justify the following sequence of events. 

Headlights worked smoothly when the parser and I stuck to clear language and simple concepts, which raises interesting questions about the future of Perplexity as a game design tool. Creations like Lost Pig, Vain Empires, and Zozzled are entertaining because they play with unconventional language and abstract concepts, and it may be difficult for Perplexity to enjoy similar success.

 

To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1: IFcomp 2022

To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1 is a choice-based work of fiction created for IFcomp 2022 by Anthony O. 

This entry was small and polished. It was created with Texture, and it involves moving verbs from the bottom of passages onto highlighted words above. Most of the action involves selecting options from phone menus, but a few choices offer glimpses into an existence outside of the automated call center script. 

This work was entertaining and responsive, and I particularly appreciated how hovertext confirmed my intended choices before I executed them. (When I tried playing it on a phone, it was very helpful to see whether I had moved to the right spot in the itemized lists.) 

I also liked the options that were available, including the choice to continue in Polish. The main menu suggested some interesting possibilities, and it found creative ways to redirect players back to the central set of choices. I kept hoping to find out more about monsters under the bed, but I might not have been clever enough to make the right selections. 

To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1 could be an interesting component in a larger work of interactive fiction. I enjoyed exploring it, but I was ultimately frustrated by my inability to make any material changes in the main character’s circumstances. 

The Hidden King's Tomb: IFcomp 2022

The Hidden King’s Tomb is a parser-based entry submitted to IFcomp 2022 by Joshua Fratis. 

As a text adventure, this entry covers all the bases. The Hidden King’s Tomb has treasures to collect, puzzles to unlock, and secret rooms to reveal. It’s a functional scavenger hunt — game historians have already chronicled how the earliest text adventures were scavenger hunts, so this entry continues a fine tradition. 

However, many of the early text adventures had extrinsic motivation that broke the fourth wall to let audiences know when they were making progress. The Hidden King’s Tomb downplays these game-like aspects to leave players alone with their intrinsic motivations. If you don’t want to find out more about the Hidden King and the events that led him to bury his secrets beneath “a lake dark and deep,” then there’s little reason to enjoy your exploration. 

The classic phrase describes interactive fiction as a narrative at war with a crossword, and I would have enjoyed seeing more of the narrative that created these puzzles. I found very little backstory about the king, his queen, or other figures within the tomb. Many of the locations were richly described, but their descriptions fell flat when I tried to examine objects and features that weren’t implemented. 

The introduction mentions “a labyrinth of locked doors and false vaults,” but I only found one locked door. The gameplay might have involved a labyrinth, but that might have been an issue with my own reading comprehension; I found it difficult to identify how different locations related to each other. 

Despite my complaints about The Hidden King’s Tomb, I still managed to blunder my way to freedom. It was smoothly implemented, and I would have appreciated a chance to explore further.

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's: IFcomp 2022

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's is a choice-based comedy by Geoffrey Golden that was entered into IFcomp 2022. 

This entry quickly establishes the stakes involved: the success of your next Zoom meeting with corporate depends on your ability to push Schtupmeister beer on a restaurant full of unsuspecting marks. It delivers an entertainingly goofy night on the job.

There are five different narrative threads that you can focus on, using either your psychic powers or more mundane observational skills. The key is to intervene at precisely the right moment, and spending too long with any one story risks missing a key moment elsewhere. 

I really enjoyed the tone of this entry, which fully embraced the absurdist corporate marketing deployed by retail food and beverage companies, describing edible horrors like Sriracha whipped cream that sounded just plausible enough to exist. 

It’s all delivered with a cheerfully sociopathic indifference: 

But it’s also worth noting that this entry, which asks you to engage in guerilla marketing to promote Schtupmeister beer, feels like its own work of guerilla marketing to promote the Adventure Snack Newsletter. 

And that’s fine! I honestly enjoyed reading through this story several times to explore each narrative thread and the ways that they could be pushed to interact with each other. 

Lord knows that there have been stunt entries in previous years that weren’t nearly as entertaining. 

No One Else Is Doing This: IFcomp 2022

No One Else Is Doing This is a choice-based community organizing simulator by Lauren O'Donoghue that was submitted to IFcomp 2022. It uses a second-person perspective to burden you with the task of going out on a Friday night and collecting £5 in dues for a community union. 

This entry is well written and smoothly implemented, combining large themes and small details to wrap the entire story in an overwhelming sense of futility. You are clearly not part of the community that you visit, located “in a ward the other side of the city from your own home,” and the union keeps itself at a distance, working through an authority figure that keeps encouraging you to collect money.

There are 32 houses that you can visit, and each one is experiencing its own problems. Even if you take notes and focus on the houses that are most likely to pay dues, the text continually questions your choices and doubts your impact. (Are you willing to encourage a bigot's prejudiced rant if it helps you meet your quota?) 

You also have to manage your own needs, because the shift ends early if you get too cold or ignore the fact that you need a bathroom break. You can goof off by reading news headlines and texting your colleagues, but their lack of commitment makes your own dedication seem even more pointless. 

I particularly appreciated the “glossary” in No One Else Is Doing This. It felt like the basic information that this faceless organization would provide to new volunteers, telling them just enough to get them started.

This entry ended so abruptly that I restarted it without noticing, and that appears to be an intentional design choice that drives home the futility of your efforts. 

If you aren’t going to do the work, somebody else might. And if nobody does it, will anyone notice? 

Chase the Sun: IFcomp 2022

Chase the Sun is a choice-based entry for IFcomp 2022 created by Frankie Kavakich.

This entry might be the depressing story of a person who gives up in the face of an unstoppable disaster. It could also be an encouraging connection between two people at the end of the world. (And it might have been an attempt to create a meta-narrative about persistence in the face of adversity? I thought that there was no way to avoid bleak destruction, but I kept trying options until I found something positive.)

Chase the Sun puts a lot of effort into establishing a specific atmosphere with its early passages:

 “Pennsylvania is known for its winding, aimless back roads like it was known for its abandoned coal mines and its flirtatious relationship with religion. That is to say, only the locals know the grimy, dirty truths.” 

It says exactly where you are and how the protagonist feels about it, presenting a consistent, richly described world that holds up across several readings. I appreciated how statements that seemed odd or out of place in the early passages were explained elsewhere in the story.

On the other hand, it would have been helpful if the story mechanics had received a similar level of attention. This work was created in Texture, and it asks readers to drag words from the bottom of a passage to connect them with highlighted points in the text above. In theory, Texture enables new types of interactivity. In practice, a lot of that potential went unused in Chase the Sun. 

From a game design standpoint, there’s almost no difference between passages that end with “click to continue” and passages that end with a single verb to be moved onto a single highlighted noun.* Chase the Sun had both types of passages and some other design compromises that felt more like awkward attempts to deliver additional backstory and less like a valid method of reader participation.

My overall impression was that stronger editorial choices or conscious design changes could have improved this story’s focus — there were a few satisfying combinations of words that moved the story forward, but it made the other sections feel under-developed. 

It’s a solid work of fiction that would benefit from some improvements to the user experience.

*You could argue that dragging words around makes the reader actively participate in the suffering of this protagonist, but the 2018 IFcomp entry Bogeyman did a fine job of exploring complicity and torment without an interface like Texture.

Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg: IFcomp 2021

Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg is a parser-based marvel created by Arthur DiBianca. The egg is a marvelous toy, both as an in-game object and as an entry in IFcomp 2021.

I really enjoyed the way that this work combined strong writing with strong coding. You might think that you want to pick things up, move to different locations, or interact with a bigger world through the parser, but the story provides elegant distractions to explain why you won’t be doing any of those things.

Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg has discarded a lot of familiar parser actions in favor of custom commands. There’s supposed to be a manual that explains how everything works, but… you’ll find out for yourself in short order. Meanwhile, the new commands introduce persistent changes into the environment that interact with each other in unexpected ways.

I thought this entry hit the sweet spot between creating challenges for the programmer and delivering enjoyable experiences for the player. Other entries have fallen flat when authors experimented with technical challenges instead of making design choices that support the story, but Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg seamlessly integrates its story and its mechanics with playful explanations.

It was a lot of fun.

RetroCON 2021: IFcomp 2021

RetroCON 2021 is a choice-based work by Sir Slice that was entered into IFcomp 2021.

The blurb for this entry encapsulates its entire story: the player is at a retro gaming convention in Las Vegas. Although the convention lasts for 2 “days,” you have as much time as you want to explore everything.

This entry has pulled off some feats of programming that are far beyond my own Twine capabilities. You can play 3 different games at the convention and gamble on 4 different games in the casino. Each of the 7 options presents a mini-game in its own right, including one that is a functional parser experience.

RetroCON 2021 was a little disorienting — the over-arching message of IFcomp is “come and enjoy this group of games,” so it gets weird and recursive to find the same message inside an IFcomp entry.

It reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. pic.twitter.com/Wo51vZTMgb

— Tom Campbell (@TomCampbell) February 22, 2020

RetroCon 2021 works as a proof of concept, but I would have enjoyed a narrative arc that offered more than arriving at a location and leaving when I got bored.

To be fair, engaging narratives are difficult to implement! Especially when you’re making a game about playing other games. It took a lot of work to build RetroCon2021, and that deserves to be recognized.

Enveloping Darkness: IFcomp 2021

Enveloping Darkness is a choice-based story by John Muhlhauser, Helen Pluta, and Othniel Aryee that was entered into IFcomp 2021.

This cleanly written fantasy adventure is light on details. For example, the protagonist's brother feels like less of a family member and more of a placeholder to provide motivation for the journey.

I did appreciate the number of choices that Enveloping Darkness offers. The passages are short, and the reader is presented with something to do at the end of each one.

However, it would have been helpful if choices hinted at possible outcomes. I got killed early by trying to rescue an innocent victim, and at one point I spent two inexplicable months in a boat on the lake. It was a complete surprise when the story ended and I was praised for saving the realm.

Enveloping Darkness also includes several fantasy creatures that don’t feel connected to the narrative. Orcs are used as generic outsiders: some are helpful, some are violent, and some are infested with parasitic brain worms. If they were replaced with Canadians, the overall experience would remain unchanged.

This story could use some developmental edits.

Kidney Kwest: IFcomp 2021

 

Kidney Kwest is an educational, parser-based adventure designed to reinforce lessons for children with kidney failure. It was created by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta, with artwork by Kristina Ness.

I enjoyed the writing in Kidney Kwest. It has the unavoidable “after-school special” tone that you would expect from the subject matter involved, but there’s a clear challenge with some basic puzzles and multiple outcomes. I was also entertained by the Kidney Fairy's sense of humor.

I don’t normally quote the bible, but Kidney Kwest makes me think of the one about trying to serve two masters. This entry is trying to do a bit more than that when you consider that it’s:

• reinforcing key messages about taking medications and avoiding specific foods,
• giving people something to do during their weekly dialysis treatments,
• engaging an audience that is 8–18 years old,
• showcasing the “Perplexity” Natural Language Prototype that was designed by Eric Zinda, and
• being judged in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.

Clearly, some tradeoffs have been made.

The overall experience reminded me of AI dungeon — specifically, the part where I endured a noticeable lag between submitting a command and receiving a report from that command. This added extra stress to my Kidney Kwest because a substantial part of the gameplay involves finding food and taking medication before bad things happen.

(I knew that the delay in sending and receiving responses wouldn’t really affect my character’s health, but it was rough having to wait through a sequence of commands before I could take care of immediate needs. And then it was only a matter of time before hunger became an issue again.)

I’d call this entry a functional proof of concept, but the real question is how Kidney Kwest is received by its target audience. If it encourages people to lead healthier lives, then my opinions (and its final score in IFcomp) are irrelevant.

The TURING Test: IFcomp 2021

The TURING Test is a choice-based work by Justin Fanzo that was submitted to IFcomp 2021.

The conflict at the heart of this entry is riveting: You are the only person on board the International Space Station, and you must determine which of the two newest arrivals is human. Will you make the correct decision and save the human race, or will you be tricked by robotic agents of destruction?

It’s a delightfully tense sequence, but the problem is that you have to wade through a few thousand words of apocalypse fan fiction — my least favorite variety of fan fiction — before you get there.

I would have preferred to see fewer passages concluding with a single link. This author is clearly capable of creating meaningful story branches, but most of the time they didn't.

In Twine, the story diagram looks like an enormous vertical column:

Many of the scenes in The TURING Test should be familiar for people who enjoyed With Folded Hands, Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminator franchise, and even The Mitchells vs. The Machines. If there was a larger message about intelligence, morality, or the ethics of interacting with sentient beings, I missed it.

Ultimately, your choice to determine who can access the space station will decide whether the story is disaster fiction or apocalypse fiction. It turns out that they’re separate genres.

Beneath Fenwick: IFcomp 2021

Beneath Fenwick is the Lovecraft-adjacent story of a remote New England town full of sinister, malformed humans lurking just out of sight. Pete Gardner created it for IFcomp 2021, and his goal was to create an experience that is “primarily choice-based but plays like a parser game.”

On the one hand, I didn’t encounter the branching storylines that are seen in a choice-based game. There is only one “correct” sequence of links that brings an audience through to the end of the story. Readers are free to explore detours on their journey, and they're also encouraged to save often, because the wrong links will end things early.

On the other hand, I didn’t receive the clues that a parser might provide when players struggle with specific puzzles. Beneath Fenwick has a “combine” command that feels a bit vague — sometimes it involves using one object on another, and at other times it merges objects together, but the error message is always “That combination does not work!”

I respect the amount of effort that went into implementing and polishing Beneath Fenwick. It’s a smooth experience! I didn’t encounter any broken links or inescapable dead ends, and things functioned consistently. 

My main issue was that the interface overshadowed the story, encouraging me to ignore the text and hunt for links. This problem has been discussed in Interactive Fiction communities before.

The writing in Beneath Fenwick is consistent, and fans of this genre might enjoy themselves. I recommend experiencing it for yourself to draw your own conclusions.  

The Corsham Witch Trial: IFcomp 2021

The Corsham Witch Trial is a choice-based story by JC Blair that was entered into IFcomp 2021.

The thing about The Corsham Witch Trial is that it contains no actual witches — and that’s fine, there weren’t any at the Salem Witch Trials, either. However, the blurb’s mention of a “worryingly urgent and irritatingly cryptic” request gets a bit confusing alongside IFcomp’s other stories of magic and supernatural horror.

The Corsham Witch Trial is a cleverly written courtroom drama. The author describes it as “a transparent attempt to enliven a disjointed and gimmick-laden manuscript with a few distracting interactive elements,” but I really enjoyed how this story was framed. Court transcripts and other documents are presented as .PDF files, and a workplace colleague asks questions about the evidence after it has been reviewed.

Every step of the Corsham Witch Trial works very hard to maintain an atmosphere of uncertainty. When the player analyzes the evidence to support a specific interpretation, their colleague explains how it can also support a different outcome.

Unfortunately, after a skillful buildup of tension and ambivalence, the entire exercise proves to be futile.

It doesn’t really matter what the player thinks, because the case was closed, the truth was discovered, and the newspapers reported the results. After such rigorously enforced neutrality, I was expecting a Broadchurch-style twist that might suggest alternative sequences of events. Instead, I got moralizing about doing the right thing even when it’s pointless.

The Corsham Witch Trial is well-executed fiction, but doesn't end up being very interactive. Other reviewers have made some good suggestions for improvements.

At King Arthur's Christmas Feast: IFcomp 2021

At King Arthur's Christmas Feast is a choice-based adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, entered into IFcomp 2021 by Travis Moy.

This is a niche piece — almost a Medieval Boy Scout Simulator — and I love it. To quote one of the story’s options: “I’m all in on this. Let’s do it.”

The first thing that an audience should know about the original story of Sir Gawain is that it makes no goddamn sense. A movie adaptation, Sword of the Valiant, came out when I was five years old. Scenes like this did not make it any easier to understand:

At King Arthur's Christmas Feast is written with choicescript, and it offers decisions that put Gawain’s thinking in a more relatable context. The reader is expected to uphold the virtues of a knight, remaining pious, courteous, magnanimous, and chaste throughout the entire journey while also embodying the spirit of fellowship.

The expectations make Gawain’s predicament more understandable: How can good manners keep you safe from an immortal giant?

I appreciated how much extra writing was necessary to humanize Gawain’s adventure. And the story notes many of the reader’s choices, referencing them in future passages. 

However, King Arthur's Christmas Feast doesn’t have a lot of branches, which means that people who stray from the correct path might find it less entertaining. I had fun pretending to be a rule-abiding poindexter, but I can see how that might not appeal to everyone.