Manlandia

When I read the blurb, I thought this was going to be either a screed by some red-pill-popping MRA or else something in the vein of Ethan of Athos.

When I read the story, I was disappointed that it wasn't remotely 'interactive fiction' unless we're including multi-part blog posts and ebooks in that now. It's just a story that you click to advance the pages. But as a story, I really liked it. It did a fantastic job capturing the voice of a early 20th-C adventure novel. Really authentic sounding!

When I found out that the reason it sounded like an adventure story from a century ago is that it was plagiarized in its entirely from an actual adventure story from a century ago, I was disappointed again. Disappointed because someone took someone else's work, Rule 63'ed it, and released it under their own name, and disappointed because a pitch-perfect '1916 adventure voice' is a lot less impressive coming from an actual 1916ian.

In short, it was...disappointing.

The text of this game is copied wholesale from "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it, by all accounts intentionally, does a poor job communicating this fact. There is a hint towards its origin, but it's not anything that could be called disclosure: you have to a) be well-versed in obscure concept art AND read between the lines to get it. All it really does is establish that yes, the author misrepresented their own game deliberately and they are prolly feeling very smug about it.

This is not something I can judge by the standards of fiction, interactive or otherwise. This is a ploy, if it's not deliberate trolling and all I can really do is inform people of this fact.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)There's not much to say about this game; it's just an old short story/novella, with all the genders swapped, and implemented in big linear chunks in Twine.

Why not just read the original book? Not much to see here.