Move On
Edit: This is deeper than I realized. See addendum below.
This is a non-interactive piece of micro fiction about a chase.
The writing is solid. It’s difficult to write action–too much detail and you lose the momentum of the scene, too little and you don’t capture what makes it exciting. This game pulls it off well.
The game’s genre is “experimental,” and the experiment seems to be that you don’t have choices–you just click a button labelled “move on” to advance the scene. The gimmick has potential in principle, but I don’t think the game pulls it off. Clicking “move on” in this game is not different than clicking “next,” so you end up with a linear narrative with lots of pauses in it.
There’s a version of this experiment that works, where the text on the single choice is recontextualized by the story that comes before it–”move on” could mean different things if you’re a soldier who’s just identified a target you need to capture, a person who’s being broken up with, or a cutthroat businessman. But
Summary
“Come on, come on!”
/>Move on
“…”
and
Summary
“I’m already far enough away”
/>Move on
“Spike lifts the VTOL into the air”
Don’t feel like they’re really using the gimmick for anything in particular.
The story’s not bad–it’s well written, exciting, and short. But it’s not interactive.
Addendum
Victor points out in this thread that the game is interactive: the results depend on when you click the link. That gimmick is neat, but I’m not sure how to evaluate it. I happened to get the “good” ending on my first playthrough so I’m not sure how fun figuring it out would be.