Ashes, by encoretoisnake
Play the game - Inklewriter - French
Ashes is a sci-fi text adventure written in Inklewriter, where you follow Josh and Aria, two space-travellers landing on Earth and finding it in disarray. Realising there is something wrong with their home, they set on finding the cause and fixing it. But, if they don’t manage to return to the correct version of Earth, they will meet their end. There are many endings, but only two can be considered good ones.
While the story is quite intriguing (what happened on Earth??? where did these symbols come from?!), much of the mysterious situation is left unanswered - most likely due to the restrictive wordcount. Which is not a problem whatsoever, because I would be down playing a longer version with more details or investigation of the phenomenon.
My main issue with the game is how abruptly and arbitrarily you can reach the bad endings (why being cautious is rewarded with a sudden ending?), with no explanation or reason (I’d wager the limit in word count affected this). It makes replaying very frustrating… unless you manage to get the good ending first.