Goat Game
Well first off, this seems likely getting a nomination from me for XYZZY best use of multimedia this year. Some gorgeous animated illustrations accompany each passage, and the text is eye-pleasing too, with some nice font and color accent choices. This looks great.
This is written in Twine, short with multiple endings, set in a sort of fantasy world full of anthropomorphic goats. You’re a researcher who just recently moved into the city, but then there’s an incident at the lab you work at, and you have to decide where your priorities lie.
Details
The writing is confident, and the beginning parts are sometimes figurative to a playfully over the top extent at times: “Your stress approaches high tide as you leave work, follows you home to lap at your doorstep.” I was entertained by that sentence, at least! This begins with a prologue which describes the city in evocative and compact prose.
Following that though, you’re settled into a life in the city of housing leases and stressful work concerns, and the tone becomes a lot greyer. The choices and story that follows generally are about establishing whether you’re happy with your lot in life, and about your relationship with your workplace. The most interesting parts are the bits of fantasy world-building, which are imaginative and vivid. Then just as I felt like things were picking up, I was given one fairly big choice… and then suddenly, an epilogue.
There was a discussion thread recently (How do you "show" choice in choice-based IF?) on how authors could communicate meaningful choices to the player, which I thought about while playing this, because two of the big suggestions people had were numbering different endings and surfacing stats. This does both, and while I definitely did understand that my choices were changing things because of those two features, the choices still felt disconnected.
About half your choices are near the beginning where it feels like you’re establishing a character (are they enjoying work or not? Do they socialize with coworkers?) and then a few scenes with some bigger choices but also a lot of things happening around you, and then suddenly there’s a time skip to an epilogue. Pacing wise, it felt like it needed one more climatic scene to bring the story home. In the time you do spend with your character, they’re fairly passive, as things mostly happen around them, instead of them feeling central. There are different endings, but I played through a few times, got some repeats, and for the most part the choices barely change the main story, and the epilogues are well written, but they’re just quick summations that all end on melancholy notes.
As I replayed it more, my character stopped feeling like a coherent being since I could pull their allegiances so far this way or that in each run, and it all started to feel like more of a binary switch puzzle I was solving, where I’m flipping choices on and off to see how they affect the stats to see how that affects the ending I get. But there’s just too much of the same text to get through for me to want to do that too many times. It felt like I’d need to start taking notes.
I feel like there’s some commentary on our relationship with work here. Unionization, power dynamics, what we owe to our workplaces, support networks… I could see some of that. Maybe some of other endings explore some of those themes more. It just seems difficult to reach them.
The graphics and presentation then are great, and the setting and writing are generally strong, so it’s not a bad time. But a single playthrough’s narrative is brief and ends abruptly, and the way the choices were set up didn’t necessarily make me want to repeat the game to see every single ending. I saw 4 out of 15 of them, and taken as a whole, the ones I saw still didn’t quite cohere into any larger story either. I’m curious how this is supposed to be experienced. If seeing every single ending would show something more.