Civil Service by Helen Liston
This is a short, atmospheric Twine game with two endings.
It’s hard to describe, so I’ll go with what my first impressions were, then what I built up afterwards.
It starts talking about returning to another choice, with three voices whispering to you. Having recently done some surface-level study of Hinduism, I wondered if it was related to the cycle of rebirth and the Trimurti, although I didn’t find much evidence of that later.
Then the game starts going through a week at an office one day at a time. No one really pays attention to you, and you mentally rate things from 1-3 stars when you see them (maybe you can do 4 or 5 if you wait long enough for timed text but I never saw a choice to pick those, only having one chosen for me). You have a crush on a guy you see outside the window whom you hope you can see, too.
Things change near the end; there’s an interlude on Wednesday night involving a trip (to Italy, I think?) where your persona seems to change, but it’s gone the next day.
After finishing the game and replaying, here’s what I think’s going on:
Summary
You are a spirit. No one can see you, except animals. The deaths of animals gives you more physical presence on a limited basis proportional to the complexity or size of the animal.
You are here because the three people in the office with you left a woman to die in a ravine after a team-building exercise. Your job as a ghost is to bring that fact to their attention.
The three at the beginning have given you similar tasks before, and ask you to do this one with positivity. Whether you are positive or not throughout the game leads to the two endings. I believe the 1-3 star ratings control that positivity.
I’m still not sure who the three are (Christian trinity? Greek fates?) or who you are (Jess’s spirit? an angel?) or what the Italian interlude is (is that you in a past life?).
Overall, the color and atmosphere were good. Timed text was used occasionally and was just infrequent enough not to be annoying. It felt like the plot was resolved, although I had trouble feeling out consistent themes or patterns in the different threads.
There were several minor typos, usually a letter or two wrong. If the author were to do a post-comp release, I’d suggest going to Twinery and using the Proof button in the Build tab to get a dump of all text in the game and to run it through a spellchecker; I’ve done that before because I’ve made numerous typos in my own games and books.
I liked this game, and would play more from this author.