Hi everyone! My name is Luis León. I’ve been creating games for the past 6 years. I’ve written and designed many projects throughout this time. You may find many of them on this itch.io page!
Anyways, I’m behind “Your Very Last Words” and “Let Me Play!” two IfComp 2025 entries. Both were published under the “Interactive Dreams” name, which corresponds to my currently-growing studio/brand. Bert, from a Discord server, asked me if I had the intention to publish a post-mortem on these projects. I’ll admit I was a little hesitant about it, but I thought it would be interesting sharing my thoughts and the intention behind them. I’m usually against the idea of talking about why things get made, since I think it can take away something from them, but I’ve found out this community appreciates these posts, so I’ll write something down.
Without further ado…
Your Very Last Words
“Your Very Last Words” is a project that was first released in 2023 under the name “Tus últimas palabras”. Since it was originally only in Spanish, I thought it would be a nice fit sending it to IfComp this year. I always had the intention of translating it, and more so after some people I met at the AMAZE festival thought the idea for this project sounded interesting, but weren’t able to play through it due to the language barrier. As with the next project I’ll be talking about (Let Me Play!), I wasn’t sure if it was a nice fit for IfComp since it wasn’t made on Twine, Inform or other tools like that, but I saw there had been other Unity entries in the past, so I gave it a go.
So what is the game about? “Your Very Last Words” places you in front of a firing squad as it gives you 10 minutes to think about the statement that will define your legacy. It takes place during 1913 during the Mexican Revolution, and it covers a period that’s stuck with me since I first knew about it, called the Ten Tragic Days. The idea for this project came to me many years ago when I read “The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges, a short story about a prisoner who’s waiting for his execution, but in the midst of it, something strange happens that lets him freeze time. I immediately thought a game about an execution would be very interesting. However, the details about the content of the story came to my mind after reading “Where the Air is Clear”, a novel by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, which talks about 1950s Mexico. In some passages, it talks about the Revolution, and paired with some of Juan Rulfo’s short stories, it gave me the tone I was looking for.
I started writing more of a moodpiece, where the target was making the player explore universal topics in which they would be able to choose options that reflected their opinion on what they would do if they were confronted with something like this. Juan Fuentes is just an excuse to place you in front of a firing squad. What would you think about? How would your last thoughts look like? Your last breaths, blinks and sweats. This is what became interesting to me. Not really to tell a story, but let the player choose from an array of options and letting them build a final statement.
This is also a kind of continuation of what I tried to achieve in The Wandering, a project I developed back in 2021 which you can also download and play for free! In that game, you can write down any dialogue you want from one of five different characters and then use those dialogues to answer questions. I wanted to (and still have the intention to) explore this idea further in more games, so it made sense to me to use it in a place in which words became everything. As another review put it: final words have a certain aura about them. Final words have been a source of famous quotes, some real, some fake. Certainly, many would like them to be dramatic and meaningful, but in the end, our final words are probably going to be something we didn’t intend to say as a last statement.
There isn’t really a system in place that scores your words, or lets you build them “accordingly”. It could’ve been the case, but do last words really need to make sense? Maybe they just end up being disjointed thoughts, not really a coherent statement. So that’s why the 3 fragments you get to choose can be whatever you decided to keep. That’s what makes it more interesting to me as a writer/designer. In that sense, I’ve read some last words that I never expected to. A private review said they got in trouble with their partner due to the last words they chose. That really made me laugh and I never imagined that could happen.
Regarding the politics of the game, even though I have a certain bias towards a posture in particular, I wrote it in a way where players could express what made sense to them. When I launched the game in 2023, I tested it a lot with some friends of mine that are from Spain. One of my preoccupations was about the script making sense even if you didn’t know what this time period involved. They found it interesting and a canvas to explore ideas about nationalism and fighting for a cause even though they didn’t have the entire context. A friend of mine who is a historian told me they didn’t find it necessary to set the project in a real historical setting, but as someone who has always wanted to represent more of my country’s history in games, I really wanted to do it regardless.
Ironically, one of the things that got lost in translation was a reference to Mexico in the opening paragraph. In the original Spanish version, the game did mention this took place here. However, I found out after uploading that I accidentally left out the word “Mexico”. This got updated for the recent Steam release!
When I started reading your reviews, I think I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Some of you praised the atmosphere and the impression it leaves. I understand why some of you didn’t find the character interesting, since… well… it never was about that. What I found out about IfComp, is that maybe there aren’t a lot of Unity submissions since many people don’t want to download a file. It’s a big ask. The criticisms about the UI / controls were taken into account, and I got to work trying to figure out a better layout for them. I’m really grateful for all of you who have played it and commented! I know this game doesn’t really operate within IF rules, but I thought you would find it interesting, that’s why I uploaded it.
You can find it for free on Steam! There were some minor changes and it also features the original Spanish dialogues.
Let Me Play!
This project originated around the same time as “Your Very Last Words” was first released. It was actually intended to be uploaded to IfComp 2023, but as we approached the deadline, it became clear we wouldn’t cut it. It started as a project between 3 people. Me, an illustrator, and a programmer. However, we were very busy with work and life, so the project was postponed.
As 2025 started, my life-long dream of having a brand/studio called Interactive Dreams was taking its first steps, with our recently published “A Dream About Parking Lots”. But “Let Me Play!” remained unfinished, and even though I wasn’t as excited about it as I was at the beginning, I didn’t want it to remain like that, so taking advantage of the fact I was working with more people, I got a lot of help with the programming and art side of things. Writing-wise, I edited some stuff, but had to cut a lot of features I wanted in the first place. We had a build just in time and uploaded it to IfComp and… well, it’s been kinda harsh, but pretty interesting overall.
So what is the game about and what was the intention behind it?
Let Me Play! was born not really to make a groundbreaking statement about the interactivity in games, but rather, to poke fun about the whole situation and in the process, explore in a playful way more of what I find interesting about creating games. At the time I was taking a theatre workshop, and combined with my long-running interest in the way theatre and games intersect, Let Me Play! was born. The pitch was to create a game where you arrive at a play which looks like you can interact with it, but the moment you want to touch anything, it breaks and the characters snap out of their own reality. This part was somehow inspired by the play Six Characters In Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello, though that story goes other places. Another big source of inspiration, not only for this project, but something in general that has shaped the way I like to approach media was Kentucky Route Zero, in particular the interlude The Entertainment, where you take part in a play as a character and spectator at the same time. This blurring of the lines is something I’m particularly interested in, so Let Me Play! was a way of exploring it in a more academical way instead of other projects I’ve written.
So, as the play goes on, and if you manage to stay on course, the characters start to freak out. Who are you? Why can you see their dialogues? Why can you choose but not them? Everything, from the very beginning was supposed to leave a tongue-in-cheek humour taste. Even the opening play “Two Strangers In An Elevator” is poking fun at the rest of the game (more on that later). Even when the third act kicks in and you start erasing the characters out of existence, it’s somehow ambiguous if it’s supposed to be scary, reflective or funny. I loved two private reviews left on the game which reacted in both extremes. One reviewer found the game very funny (great!) and another reviewer had to stop playing since they didn’t want to keep on terrifying the characters (also great!). At the end of the day, it’s a more experimental conceptual piece, more than a fully fleshed narrative. And, at that, I found out it goes on for way longer than I had intended. The game can take a lot more than 15 minutes, which was the original target. I’ll talk more about that, but one of the biggest takeaways I have from this experience is cutting even more dialogues to make it sharper and get to the point more quickly.
The whole ending was a tribute to Niebla by Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno, and when you have to kill the play and kill the author, it’s supposed to be, again, tongue-in-cheek. But in the process, I was exploring something I’ve been doing in other games, which is measuring the level at which players can co-author a game. The ending for Let Me Play! takes it to the extreme, and it arrives at a place in which, if you want to play something you really desire to, why not create it yourself? Not in a cynical tone, but in an inspiring one. Having dealt with lack of motivation, I like to think of it as a call to create, but destruction is also part of it.
Even though I’ve played many IF works before, I’ll admit I’m not that familiar with what this community expects or doesn’t expect from an IfComp submission. There was a particular review which made me laugh a lot that stated that this game seemed as if it went out of the way to annoy everyone from this community! Of course, I thought, timed-text, lack of choice and you can’t go back to previous dialogues. Even though the game was designed to comment on how some people may find it annoying, funnily enough, I never thought IntFiction would react like that to the game.
There were some reviews that criticized it quite a bit! At the beginning I found them hard to read. Especially one review that commented on the game looking as if I had just played BioShock and found it the most interesting game in the world. I don’t particularly like BioShock’s plot twist! So that was a harsh burn. Other reviews commented on the game not being very interesting and not saying anything new, which I understand. Again, it wasn’t really aiming for that. And as I’ve read more reviews on the game, both positive and negative, I think the game has two major problems: tone(?) and length. If the game was over more quickly, maybe it would come across more as a conceptual piece instead of a long-form narrative of sorts. Also, I think the cover art makes it look very dramatic. I wanted the cover art to be something very different, but it was done in a hurry, so I’d like it to be something very different.
There are some other tidbits about the game which were also very interesting. Some people never saw the “Let Me Play!” button and thought the opening play was everything the game had to offer, which I didn’t think wouldn’t actually happen. Maybe the button should be more obvious? Someone complained about the opening play having stock-like dialogues, which was the entire point! I thought it wouldn’t be interesting enough to sit through, so… I guess it’s good some people wanted to see the entire play?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think we’d get the reactions this game got, but it still has been a very interesting experience. I’ve learned a lot about this community, the way it works, and I appreciate that even when people don’t like a game, they can write whole paragraphs about it, which is something I really enjoy. A particular shoutout to all of those people who wanted to boost the game since it wasn’t getting reviewed because it was a Unity game.
I want to make some changes to the project, as I have plans of releasing it to more people! I had a lot of fun writing it, because it’s very different from other games I’ve done in the past. Reading your opinions and writing this has given me more clarity about it.