Witchfinders by Tania Dreams
Witchfinders is a short Twine game about a witch in a 19th century Edinburgh where detecting and prosecuting witches is still a pastime for some. The game begins rather bizarrely:
Even if we ignore that both ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Renaissance’ are misspelled, and that there are no fewer than three article errors in the sentence, there is still the problem that this makes no sense. How can it be the case that the Age of Enlightenment giving way to Romanticism makes us leave behind the ‘brutality’ of the Middle Ages, which ended some four centuries earlier? This doesn’t inspire confidence, which is very important to inspire at the start of a game. The game then goes on to tell me that I’ll be surprised that I won’t be able to play a witchfinder, because instead I am… the witch! Actually, there are so many IF games in which you are a witch (or wizard) that it would have been a lot more surprising to be the witchfinder!
Thankfully, the rest of the game is significantly better. It is also very much more down to earth. You visit a handful of locations in Edinburgh, learn about a few problems, collect some ingredients, and solve the problems. At all points the prose is very sparse; NPCs are just quest-giving machines, locations are never detailed in more than two sentences, and the PC doesn’t have much of an inner life. There is a system in place where by earning ‘witch points’ you can get yourself persecuted. But there’s no real tension, in part because it is easy to avoid the witch points, and in part because everything is so sparse and functional that you’re never caught up in the fiction.
Actually the experience is somewhat reminiscent of playing a mediocre graphical RPG like Oblivion. There’s a sick child to be saved, but the only possible interaction with him is to click and hear ‘ugh’. You can talk to his father, who has two endlessly repeated sentences of text to give you the quest. You walk into the woods and harvest the necessary ingredient. You return to the father, click, press the ‘give medicine’ button, get the XP and gold coins, and walk away towards the next quest. Without the visuals to distract us, the equivalent experience is Witchfinder shows more clearly how bare bones this approach is. Why don’t we have a more detailed conversation with the father? Why isn’t there a story in which the suspense slowly mounts as even the people we care about start getting suspicious? Why aren’t we forced to choose between helping the needy and our own safety? Why isn’t our character more fleshed out? In general, why isn’t there more fiction in this interactive fiction? I’m just left wishing for a lot more.