Uninteractive Fiction 2 by Leah Thargic
This review contains massive spoilers for the game. (Yes, I’m serious. There are indeed things to spoil about this game.)
(I managed to lose.)
Uninteractive Fiction 2 by Damon Wakes (let us dispense with the pseudonym, shall we?) is a follow-up to the wildly successful last-place entry of last year’s Comp. I’m half-serious about “wildly successful.” Even though Uninteractive Fiction finished almost a full point(!) below the second-to-last-place entry, it spurred conversations both comic and thoughtful about the very ontology of IF.
Already the reviews for UF2 are rolling in, some smartass and some wearied, and it is currently rated last of all the 2025 IFComp games on IFDB, although it’s still very early. The premise is simple: last year, “You lose” was the result of the single possible click in UF. This year, it’s “You win,” accompanied by a glorious fanfare. On the surface, it seems like a trolling trifle.
I wondered if that’s truly all UF2 was, so I opened the game in Twine. (Full disclosure: My motive was not quite that pure, as I was also searching for the source of the audio.) Aha! A single passage titled “Good Luck Importing This”. A challenge, then.
The solution requires some knowledge of the inner workings of Twine. Twine can store things like images and audio within the generated webpage itself rather than as links to external files. It does so using Base64 encoding. The first step is to take the Base64 string from the “Good Luck Importing This” passage and drop it into a Base64 decoder. The result is … more gibberish, but clearly HTML, and if you’ve looked at the raw HTML output of a Twine game, you might recognize it as such. Take the resulting text string, save it as HTML, and run it to get … the same result?
Of course, at this point, we must import our new HTML file back into Twine, and the game’s secrets are revealed.
The passages are arranged in the shape of a skull, and they have a variety of amusing names, including many variations of “SUPER DUPER MEGA TOP SECRET.” One similarly named passage includes “TEST FROM HERE” as its text, and when we do, we are delivered to our true reward:
You could have just accepted the win, but instead you delved too greedily and too deep. You lose.
The text of “you lose” cycles through a rainbow of hues, and the familiar “womp … womp … waaaAAAaah” sound effect from the original UF plays. In fact, through some circumlocutious coding, it seems that starting from any passage other than the official one will lead to this end.
It’s hard to take our loss too seriously, though. The passages are brief and entertaining to peruse, including one titled “Easter Egg” (“Made you look.”) and one called “NOTE” (“I sure hope this actually looks like a skull in the thumbnail preview flowchart.”).
So it’s difficult what to make of UF2 as a whole. It seems like Wakes isn’t just playing a metagame, he’s playing a meta-metagame with IFComp as its base. He’s now run two “franchises” of metagame content—the UF series and of course the genital trauma games, which randomly select between players getting the “real” game or a grating awful parody of one at the start. This also isn’t the first time that Wakes has artfully arranged his games’ Twine passages. In DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, the passages take the shape of, um, a dick, and in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG the passages literally spell out “NO DICK THIS TIME”.
It all feels pretty light, though, and that’s good. The games antagonize the players and push (or punch) certain buttons, but they never take themselves too seriously. It’d be tempting to wade into headier explanations, but Mike Russo’s review of the original UF wisely cautions against traveling too far down that path. The concept of “the death of __________” (the player, the author, the genre of IF, irony, etc.) is itself dead, and postmodernism no longer feels very modern.
Still, these extended gags are part of Wakes’s oeuvre, and it is less common for IF critics to consider the arc of an author’s work within the venue of a particular Comp. As silly or superficial as these games might seem, craft and care are put into them. Their secrets feel more than mere easter eggs, but they also don’t rise to the level of meaningful substance. I worry that the coded messages are too goofy for a more thoughtful multigame metanarrative to seep through.
And ultimately, that’s fine. I had fun solving the mystery of UF2 and I enjoyed poking around its rubble. Perhaps I’m even falling into some 4-D chess trap Wakes has crafted by even writing about these secrets in the first place, and I’m still impressed by the sorcery of encoding a Twine game entirely within the passage of a Twine game. The game doesn’t deserve the last-place finish it may very well be headed for, though I’m not sure my score of a 4 will be enough to place it much higher.