This one suffered for me, I’m afraid, after playing Turandot. They’re both adaptations of classics, but whereas Turandot does some really wild stuff with the story from the opera, Rip Retold kinda sticks to the basics of Rip Van Winkle and slightly modernizes things. It tweaks the plot, presents the narrative from another POV, but I didn’t get the sense that Rip Van Winkle, as a story, gained much from these revisions. I didn’t come away with a new understanding of the material.
I also feel like it sacrificed the elements of the original that stick in my memory the most! Thunder in the mountains. An odd charge in the atmosphere. The sense that small and mundane things, like a game of ninepins, can become alien and momentous during a shift that happens when you didn’t realize it was happening. That happens because you didn’t realize.
This game was pretty linear. Now linearity isn’t inherently bad, but it’s gotta be handled with care in a text game. Otherwise you’re just reading an e-book! Again, comparing it to Turandot, Turandot was linear too, but it’s filled with all these micro-choices so that the experience flexes and bends as you’re reading. Rip Retold mostly has turn-the-page mechanics. I think the first time the player can interact in another way comes halfway through, and there are only a few points like that.