The Witch Girls
Amy Stevens
OK! This was, indeed, creepy! And the different paths through the game all had different kinds of creepiness in them, which was… well, I was going to say ‘appreciated’, but I don’t know if I can call ‘being squicked out’ really something I want to appreciate. It was effective! And I chose to play a game with a ‘horror’ tag, and if I chose to disbelieve the tag (‘enh, these games are never actually that bad’), that’s on me. Don’t make my mistake! It is indeed that bad!
I don’t have a lot more to say about the content of the game other than ‘effectively written’, but I do want to call out a feature that I loved to bits: after you play through the game once, you get to see a tree of all the choice points in the game, with the ones you saw filled out, and the ones you haven’t seen filled with question marks. And you can click on any node and just go to that point in the story! And play out the endings you haven’t seen! It was glorious. I loved being able to see the work as a whole, know the ins and outs of all the possible creepy endings these two well-realized young teens had in store for them, and was reasonably chuffed that flying blind my first time, I had nonetheless reached my favorite ending of the group.
Did the author have anything to say? Like a lot of effective horror stories, the author did an excellent job of capturing in pretty spare detail the essence of the ‘desire gone wrong’, in a particular place and at a particular age.
Did I have anything to do? Yes! Not only was I able to navigate a path through the story on my own, I then was given the tools to see the paths not taken, so I could compare my own path with the other ones!