What did I just read? I guess it lists its genre as “mystery, experimental, contemporary, dynamic fic.” I think I have a decent picture of what’s going on in the story. But I clicked a lot of things to get to the end with no real idea why I chose the specific ones I did, or whether I saw a different face of the game because of it.
It was oddly compelling though.
Also an odd mix of fairly competent and often poetic writing and the most basic typos. You might have “a grey and spectral effort from the office printer” or “Today they arrive at once. Together. Their centipede feet climb the stairs in ghostlike unison” alongside regularly mixing up your/you’re, its/it’s or misspelling “wierd.”
I don’t know if it has branching in the traditional sense, but you can definitely see or miss scenes depending on which links you choose, it’s just not signposted at all. Maybe you’re supposed to figure out how to get the most information out of the work through trial and error? Or every reader is just supposed to have a unique experience and not really know why they had the one they did because that’s life, I guess.
Yeah, your summary describes what I thought was going on.
And yeah, the 1/2/3-star ratings that you give things are what determine the endings, which is interesting because on my first playthrough those felt to me like the most opaque disconnected part of the game so I just chose randomly. I should go look at it again: it just felt really insincere: why would an arbitrary star rating control the outcome and not the things you actually did? Is this some kind of commentary on capitalism? Online storefronts trying to push us to apply a star rating to everything? Dunno.
This stressed me out while I was playing; I was constantly trying to figure out if some links were “better” to click than others.
Same. I just started choosing randomly, without any real reasoning behind it, because I had no idea what the effect of choosing one instead of another would be.
I’m still trying to figure this out haha. My interpretation was close to @mathbrush’s, although I must have missed the part that specifies the three colleagues left Jess to die in a ravine (or I just failed to infer that). I had thought the woman in the Italy flashback was the woman who died, although thinking about it more now I don’t think that really makes sense…
I know your end goal is bringing Jess back to life; I seem to have gotten the sub-par ending where she’s a sort of zombie instead of a fully resurrected person, but I’m going to play again and try to get the good ending.
I don’t think they did that: I believe they’re only guilty of treating her as such a non-entity that they didn’t realize she hadn’t been in to work for however long.
I was under the impression that 25 people went to a team building exercise, and Jess was there but these three got her name wrong. Then Jess got trapped in a ravine but no one even remembered her or cared about her so when everyone went home no one noticed she was left behind. So I don’t think she was intentionally left behind but just ignored, which is I think what Josh is saying
I totally missed the mention that there were 25 people at team building day or any mention of there being more employees at the company than Jess and her three named coworkers, and the ending I got also made it sound like she hadn’t died yet and the PC was just trying to get someone to find her before she did die, and not at all like the PC was performing necromancy that could go wrong and leave her a zombie!
I don’t know what’s going on with the Italy segment. I definitely assumed the woman was Jess at first, but we’ve also got a different POV character and I don’t know if that’s supposed to be someone who exists elsewhere in the game or not.
Oh wow!! Okay, so I guess the story varies a lot based on which links you click…
My one potential interpretation right now is that the POV character during that segment is still the PC, and this is something they did before they became a ghost that they have to atone for?
The voices say this is your chance to be more positive. Positive means higher star ratings. You gave your girlfriend 1 star in a past life. She also died because you told her you’d bring an asthma inhaler but when she had an attack, she couldn’t find it because you lied. So it seems you were given another chance to be kind aka give higher star ratings.
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still intended to be read as the PC having raised her from the dead, and her coworkers were just going “oh wow good thing we weren’t too late” because of course that’s what you’d assume if you weren’t aware of any supernatural happenings. There may have been a passage I didn’t see that would have made that clearer. But yeah, the ending I got was the coworkers going back to the ravine, finding Jess unconscious but alive, and calling an ambulance. The PC certainly did some rituals but I thought they were just to influence the coworkers.
This didn’t occur to me because the tone/voice seemed so different, but mathbrush does lay out a pretty persuasive case!
Hmm, re: whether the POV character in the Italy flashback is the same as the main PC, I was a bit jarred when I first got that idea because I had been viewing the PC as a woman up until that point. I couldn’t remember if I had a specific reason for that, though, and figured it had just been a subconscious assumption—but on starting a replay just now:
Okay wow, just finished that playthrough and it was a completely different experience! This time I got the same ending that EJ did.
Re: the Italy flashback again, I so strongly got “man” vibes from the POV character there that, as per my above post, I thought the PC being called “she” meant they couldn’t be the same person. But the flashback is intro’d with “it makes me remember,” and there’s the one-star thing that Brian pointed out, and there’s no reason that character couldn’t be a woman. So I’ve now circled back to concluding that they are the same person haha.
To me the gender thing didn’t really enter into it, the ghost just reads so earnest to me, and not in a “my first instinct is to be a cynical uncaring jerk but I’m trying to do better because a supernatural entity said I had to” way. Like, the Italy narrator is so egregiously awful and the ghost seems so well-meaning (and so appalled by the less egregious awfulness of Jess’s coworkers!) that it just doesn’t quite mesh for me even as a redemption arc. But I do think that must have been what was intended.
Interesting, I read the ghost as pretty much exactly this haha. They did seem to genuinely care about Jess and think the way the co-workers treated her was awful, but overall they came across as fairly selfish and petty to me. But that could be in part because I picked mostly one- and two-star options on my initial playthrough!
If Jess had been someone she’d known and liked in life, that might not seem as contradictory to me; what seems at odds with the personality established in the Italy flashback to me is the immediate caring for a stranger because that stranger was just so nice and so hard done by. But I guess death changes a person!