The Griffin and the Minor Canon

The idea of adapting old stories into interactive fiction is one with great appeal to me - "Bronze" remains one of my favourites to this day - and "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" is a beautifully rendered example. I played it first, then read the short story, and was impressed with how elegant the rendering was. The translation into second person adds a layer of - shall we say humanity? - to the protagonist that is left rather more implicit in the original, while benefiting from Stockton's rhythmatic prose (perfect for Twine). It's also pleasing to look at as well.

(I'm grading generously with four stars, but it is worth playing, and I wouldn't want anyone to be put off by a low IFDB average. It is the sort of exercise in which less is more.)

Note: Itch doesn't seem to play well with Chrome. Use another browser, it's worth it.

Recommended for: when you crave a faerie tale with genuine depth.

This Twine game is longer than most Twine games running from 30 to 60 minutes.

It is an adaptation of an old short story about a Griffin and a church official that had a good grasp of location to begin with. Groover has assembled all the locations in the story into a coherent world.

The story itself is poignant and meaningful, which has led to its enduring popularity as a short story.

Overall, the writing is descriptive, and I enjoyed the interactivity. At the time that I played the game, there was more timed delays than I preferred, but the author was contemplating shortening them.

This has been delightful and fun, although a little tedious to navigate.

This is a common problem on hypertexts that tries to use model world and navigate locations. Just like in howling dogs, the feeling is: where I should go to advance the plot? What link or list of links should I press to advance the story?

This issue constantly gets in the way of the enjoyment of the story, being all the time micro-stuck.

It has the sense to leave the player agency of exploring the model world when the script is linear? Hmmm.

The execution and style are very fine, with a very beautiful choice of font and color. I had trouble with timed passages (as others players), but on the contrary: I felt they were well-timed most of the time (probably this was already fixed by the author) but, I missed one or two passages due to a very short timed fade out. I would prefer an ugly and common <--- back link instead of this commodities, that... as we have seen, could fail from time to time, or from circumstances of the reader.

Anyway, I think this is a really fine piece, so it is 4 out of 5 stars, just for *that* problem.