Perpetūra: an interactive literary romance across five eras, free to read in the browser

Hi all!

I wanted to share Perpetūra, a choice-based literary romance I have been building that runs in the browser on a small custom engine. No parser, no Twine, just prose and the choices you make inside it. Four of its stories are live now, with a final one still in the writing.

The idea behind it is a feeling I have never found the word for, the kind that turns up for no reason and is gone before you can look at it properly. The whole game is an attempt to write that feeling rather than explain it. Each story follows a woman in a different century, each carrying the same quiet, sourceless thing she cannot put into words. Every story stands alone and branches for real, with its own endings, and every one has a path where she comes out answering to no one but herself.

It is not bare text. Each story has its own scene art and an original score, with a theme written for each one, so the prose has a mood to sit inside. I have spent the last stretch rewriting the earlier stories properly and finishing the newest, and it is finally in the shape I always meant it to be.

It is free, needs no sign-up, runs on desktop and mobile, saves locally, and works offline. The more intimate scenes are optional and sit behind an age toggle in the settings. If you do read one, I would genuinely welcome any reaction, whether that is what landed, what did not, or a bug. There is a feedback form built into the game, or you can just reply here.

A note on process, since this community cares about it and I would rather be plain than coy. I write the work myself; the outlines, the drafts, and the decisions are mine. I use AI as a tool downstream of that, for drafting help and a review pass I built, and the art and music are generated. If that makes it not for you, I understand completely, and I would sooner say so here than have you feel misled later.

You can read it at https://perpetura.netlify.app/

First off, I appreciate the transparency of AI use.

What did land for me was the background music. On a low volume it really worked well.

The interface was serviceable. There is a problem with text jumping about. The typewriter effect wraps words while mid-typing. The choices at the bottom slide over slightly on hover, causing words to jump. Lastly, I believe images load when they are in view, causing text to jump to make room for the image. I found this to be distracting, but not detrimental.

You mention that you used AI “downstream” of your original thoughts and ideas, so I have to assume that AI was used for the prose. Unfortunately, this was a major letdown for me. This was from the first page…

It arrived the way weather arrives. {Not} suddenly, {but} as a shift in pressure. One moment I was sitting in a quiet room that I had made quiet through careful effort. The next moment the room was the same {but} I was {not}. My chest adjusted, like a compass brought near iron, {not} painful, {not} even unpleasant, exactly. Simply present, in a way that my arranging had {not} accounted for.

AI is an illusion of understanding so it overcompensates with what a thing isn’t. Repeatedly. (I think it’s favourite word is “not”.) When patterns of writing are overused, it does a disservice to the story. (This pattern is used heavily throughout the prose.) There was also a passage where the protagonist reflected on her writing just before closing her journal. Then the next paragraph described her writing for another hour before closing the journal. AI has trouble keeping track of things as it writes.

Unfortunately, I did not finish the first story.

Also, I only saw three stories, but you mentioned four were live. That coupled with you mentioning “No parser, no Twine, just prose…” and my spider senses tingle.