The Staycation by Maggie H
Boy, that escalated quickly. One moment I’m waving goodbye to my friends, and the next I’m scared by a cat, and the next I’m sobbing on the phone, and the next I’m back at my parents’ house having apparently suffered a complete mental breakdown. All this takes maybe five minutes of interaction. There just doesn’t seem to be enough here to get us from one part of the game to the other; it feels like a disjointed series of mini-scenes which we can only look at with some puzzlement. (Finishing in five minutes is extra surprising when the game is billed as being two hours long.)
There’s one thing I liked about The Staycation, and that’s the use of icons. The problem with Texture is that it quite often feels as merely a cumbersome version of Twine: having to drag one text to another is extra work, it slows you down, and therefore it should have some clear benefit over clicking a link. Very often it doesn’t. But here there were some moments where, yes, I could see the benefit. For instance, I loved the place where the text is only
and the icon you have to drag to it is a little person doing a joyful somersault. That’s just fun. And it has the exact right amount of emptiness: the emoticon, being a stereotyped expression of a ready-made emotion, suggests that there’s nothing authentic about the protagonist’s joy. And of course there isn’t.