Taurus and Andromeda A short procedural interactive fiction experiment
Inspired by Borges’ “The House of Asterion”, this game places the player inside an infinite, shifting labyrinth. Rooms are generated as you move, but the story unfolds through repetition, memory, and omission rather than exploration alone.
You are looking for your lost lover.
Or perhaps you are looking for a way to stop looking.
The game is short, text-only, and playable in the browser, with multiple endings shaped by small, sometimes uncomfortable choices.
Content warning (spoilers):
Themes of violence and femicide.
I’m interested in the premise, but (I think in common with many members of this community) I find reading works that make heavy use of timed text frustrating. Would you consider adding an option to disable it?
And then, I’m not an itch.io user, so I don’t know if there’s any way to control these itch.io UI elements, but if possible, it would be good to set it so that they don’t obscure clickable elements in the game.
Thanks for your feedback! The itch page is not responsive but the games is, if you click the button on the bottom right it goes fullscreen. I eventually can host in my website if that helps.
The procedural text means to be garbage/confusing, is role is not creating the story but keeping away from it.
Ok, well, that ends any interest I had in it. There’s already plenty of confusing garbage on the internet. I guess I’m not your audience, but that may be something to consider as you continue to develop it.
Yeah I’ll work on better combination of words, thanks for your feedback.
For anyone else trying: keep going, after some iteration that seems nonsensical, non procedural elements starts to appear. How you interact with them will lead to different endings. Even “starting over“ changes the world
Hmm. Well, I can’t say I hate this, there’s nothing in particular wrong with it- I just don’t find the procedural aspect to be a meaningful addition. Among other things, it’s very odd to be clicking on choices where the actual text containing the choices means nothing to me. Unless it does? I have an inkling of what the meaningful choices are but only because they rise above the sea of undifferentiated verbiage.
I made another small update of the game, fixing some bugs and improved text generation: I added semantic constraints so only the correct category of objects should do some actions, example “phone“ is tagged as “small“, “electronic“, “portable“ so it shouldn’t gape anymore
