Civil Service

The protagonist of Civil Service appears at first to be a naive positive-thinking type taking a job in a dysfunctional government agency. It soon becomes apparent that something else is going on, and you are instead playing as a ghost who’s been tasked by a set of three unspecified supernatural entities (tripartite goddess? Three witches?) to (Spoiler - click to show)save a woman who fell down a ravine on a company outing and was left there to die by her apathetic coworkers, who didn’t notice she was gone.

The game bills itself as dynamic fiction, so I was expecting no meaningful choice, but this was not the case—not only are there multiple endings, but you can miss entire plot-important scenes by clicking the wrong link. The problem is that the import of the link you are clicking is in no way clear before you click it. For instance, there’s a passage early on with two links, one on a mention of a tin of biscuits in the office and one on a mention of the need to smile. The former gives the reader a scene that provides the first intimations of what you’re really here for, while the latter just skips over that and moves to the next “main” passage. But there’s no indication that the biscuits are particularly significant until you click on that link, and a player who clicks on “smile” hoping to get some elaboration on that idea (which they will not get) will never know what they missed. Sometimes the digression is just a single short, nonessential passage, and sometimes both links in a passage seem to lead to the same passage, but there seems to be no way to even guess at when that’s the case and when you’re missing whole scenes. Early on, I made ample use of the back button to make sure I was getting the most out of my experience, but this got a little tedious and took me out of the flow of the story, so after the first in-game day or two, I gave up.

(I did like that the cycling links were a different color from the links that move the player forward, though!)

Once I stopped hitting the back button so often and started letting the experience carry me along, I was entranced by Civil Service’s prose-poem-like writing and its effectively dreary atmosphere with occasional flashes of hope, and I was excited to further explore its premise, which is exactly the kind of weird that I enjoy. As a commentary on modern office culture, though, it has some sharply observed details, but leaves the bigger picture kind of fuzzy, and doesn’t seem to have much to say about what underlies workplace dysfunction other than individuals being jerks.

So I was intrigued and often charmed by Civil Service, and on the whole I would say I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure the way it was using interactivity was to its benefit, and it ultimately feels a little less than the sum of its parts.

This is a short, atmospheric Twine game with two endings.

It's hard to describe, so I'll go with what my first impressions were, then what I built up afterwards.

It starts talking about returning to another choice, with three voices whispering to you. Having recently done some surface-level study of Hinduism, I wondered if it was related to the cycle of rebirth and the Trimurti, although I didn't find much evidence of that later.

Then the game starts going through a week at an office one day at a time. No one really pays attention to you, and you mentally rate things from 1-3 stars when you see them (maybe you can do 4 or 5 if you wait long enough for timed text but I never saw a choice to pick those, only having one chosen for me). You have a crush on a guy you see outside the window whom you hope you can see, too.

Things change near the end; there's an interlude on Wednesday night involving a trip (to Italy, I think?) where your persona seems to change, but it's gone the next day.

After finishing the game and replaying, here's what I think's going on:

(Spoiler - click to show)
You are a spirit. No one can see you, except animals. The deaths of animals gives you more physical presence on a limited basis proportional to the complexity or size of the animal.

You are here because the three people in the office with you left a woman to die in a ravine after a team-building exercise. Your job as a ghost is to bring that fact to their attention.

The three at the beginning have given you similar tasks before, and ask you to do this one with positivity. Whether you are positive or not throughout the game leads to the two endings. I believe the 1-3 star ratings control that positivity.

I'm still not sure who the three are (Christian trinity? Greek fates?) or who you are (Jess's spirit? an angel?) or what the Italian interlude is (is that you in a past life?).


Overall, the color and atmosphere were good. Timed text was used occasionally and was just infrequent enough not to be annoying. It felt like the plot was resolved, although I had trouble feeling out consistent themes or patterns in the different threads.

There were several minor typos, usually a letter or two wrong. If the author were to do a post-comp release, I'd suggest going to Twinery and using the Proof button in the Build tab to get a dump of all text in the game and to run it through a spellchecker; I've done that before because I've made numerous typos in my own games and books.

I liked this game, and would play more from this author.