That’s all the stuff I played during the comp period, now we’re into stuff I played afterwards!
The Witch Girls
Twine choice-based story. The prose is strong, with an excellent build-up of tension. You’re a thirteen year old girl, and the time period is like, you have a cell phone but there’s no social media yet. You and your friend are enamoured with the idea of getting boyfriends, because that’s what all grown-up girls want. But why not dabble in a a little bit of witchcraft to help that along? Who knows how your little ritual will go?
Some background-appropriate piano music you have the option to turn off, plus font size and color options. The clickable text is helpfully color-coded to indicate the type of thing it does. Default green exposes more text when you click on it (the text is sometimes slightly disorienting with where it shows up, I think a slightly slower fade-in would’ve helped because it was sometimes hard to tell what text was added, but I got used to it). Pink underline is the keyword that goes to the next page. Really interesting design choice is with the brown keywords which are the branching choices. But they aren’t just multiple choice links at the end of a Twine page; instead it’s all implemented as cyclical keywords (as in, you click on the text, the text changes to a different option, and then your choice gets locked in when you click on a pink link to continue the story). A lot of Twine works will use cycling, but often, it feels like, more as flavor. Here it remembers and uses them as the primary choice mechanic. I quite like it! It feels like a more purposeful decision I’m committing to the page than with just clicking a link. At some points later on, the cycle keywords came after the “continue to the nxt passage” keyword, and I’d have to stop and think about which type of keyword did what and which one I wanted to click on first.
Almost completely beside the point, but it early on describes you being a preteen, and then later on as thirteen years old. I was a bit confused, but the story I think fits more for thirteen-ish. Writing is quite polished, only typo I saw was “purchaces”.
The story I saw down my path was excellent, with a sense of lurking apprehension; a story about coming-of-age teenage confusion and want, with a lust to fit in and stand out and be grown up and not be TOO grown up, either. It feels positively quaint because it’s certainly not a story that takes place within the social media age; at one point I paid extra to text a picture to my friend. The rumors and gossip all take place at lunch tables and possibly in texts, and information comes from a spellbook or text message and not just from the internet. There was a horrifying magnificent scene on a beach, vividly rendered, which does a really good job of involving and engaging me as the player.
The first ending I got did feel slightly abrupt. Still good. There’s a neat little flowchart that shows all the different paths after I finished, and I went back to my last choice and then picked the other option, and the ending I saw there left on a slightly stronger resonating note. With these types of stories it’s the final image or passage that really sticks to you. This was great!
First ending I got
Ending 1C: Together