Errand Run
Twine, short. You’re on an errand run to the supermarket for some groceries, trying to just go about your normal routine. Hey, chin up, you just gotta keep moving on with your life. No sad girl summer for you!
Some good use of text effects. I think this story is effective. I DO have slightly higher expectations on execution for such short pieces as this: I thought the exposition was a bit back-loaded (but maybe that’s unavoidable for the story) and some of the inner monologue is slightly off to me: it’s sometimes written like how someone might talk or write online, but it didn’t come across to me like how someone would think to themselves. Did like the use of the quote at the end, a good ending note. A solid short story.
Spoilers
So what’s this going for? It seems like the story of someone just going to the supermarket like normal, picking through produce and deciding what to buy. But then it turns out that there’s been some sort of rapture event causing a lot of death and violence in the aftermath, and this errand is your coping mechanism, a way of trying to pretend everything is the way it was before. But it’s not quite a horror story shock twist reveal, because this tips its hand quite early that all isn’t well with some of its text effects. Instead, it’s more like a tension as you anticipate learning about what’s actually going on. This tension is effective. There’s a lot of small clues in how everything is described as well, which become more obvious as you go along. The shopping doesn’t really try to get you invested in the choices, or at least I didn’t really think about whether to buy onions or not, all that much.
Instead, the game does two things I found interesting. One is its use of hypertext: timed text and interruption and color and spacing. It feels like these sorts of effects have been resurging more often in Twine entries recently? But this uses it sparingly, and well.
The other thing is its use of second person. Two specific lines, after you suddenly remember that your neighbor is dead and you’ve been trying to suppress that knowledge: “Don’t act so suprised[sic]. You were there, weren’t you?” and then later on, “And your brother. Remember?”
So this is a use of second person where the player character has been dissociating, and their own narration is calling themselves (or ourselves) out. There’s a schism in the protagonist’s mind, and the text effects and these two lines are when that suppressed side of their mind is breaking through. The second line I quoted, the “And your brother. Remember?” did briefly take me out of the story a moment, just because it felt like a heavy prod of a setup for exposition. Like, are the sides of my screen going wavy there, are we about to enter a flashback sequence? Yeah we are, but the details end up a bit more interesting than your standard zombie apocalypse.