Bee

Scatmania
What's so inspirational about this story is the compelling realism from the characters. Initially, I found it somewhat difficult to relate to them: I know next to nothing about the US education system, don't 'get' spelling bees (apparently they're a big thing over there), and certainly can't put myself in the position of a home-schooled American girl with a super-religious family background! But before long, I was starting to really feel for the character and beginning to see how her life fit together.
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Games That Exist
Parsing Interaction in Emily Short's Bee
Bee is engrossing because it never resorts to explicit, over-the-top, 'beady-eyed religious fundamentalist' characterizations. The weirdness of the narrator's environment reveals itself with subtlety. The characters' religious fundamentalism is a matter-of-fact, even endearing, part of their complex personalities, preventing them from being reduced to one-note caricatures. The parents are devout, controlling and paranoid, but never cruel. The annoying but beloved younger sister is allowed, if not always encouraged, to be strange and to draw strange things.
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PC Gamer
A great example of how interactive fiction can work without a big dramatic concept ...
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XYZZY Awards blog
Reviews of Best Writing Nominees (Yoon Ha Lee)
Upon reflection, the writing in Bee is quite adroit, and my initial dislike for it is probably a matter of idiosyncratic player reaction. I imagine that it worked just fine for many players. But that first reaction to the early prose was so difficult to overcome that, by the game's end, I was more relieved than sad to see it go.
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XYZZY Awards blog
Reviews of Best Writing Nominees (Paul O'Brian)
Most every passage of the game is a pleasure to read, and a few are nothing short of sublime and beautiful. As usual for Short, she accomplishes a great deal with subtlety, understatement, and concision. Her trademark sentence fragments are sparser here than in her parser-based games (probably due to the lack of room descriptions), but used to good effect where they appear. Where she outdoes herself is in characterization. The prose feels deeply inhabited by the main character's point of view, in a way that is clear-eyed enough to let us understand some of the things she does not, but also authentic enough that it generates sympathy not only for her situation but for those around her who create that situation.
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XYZZY Awards blog
Reviews of Best Writing Nominees (Robb Sherwin)
I can't categorize this Varytale experience as a role-playing game, CYOA story, text adventure, all three or something in between, but Bee made me want to spend more time with the people inside it, which is more important than classification, anyway.
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Storycade
With Varytale's controls, it feels as though you are navigating the way your character feels throughout a functional story rather than your taking part in creating the story. That is a strong difference than traditional parser interactive fiction. While there were stats to control, acquaintances to make, and Zulu root words to study, it felt like I was seeing the world through a characters eyes rather than an active participant in the way the story engaged. This is not a slight to Short's writing, which was deft and well-conceived, it was just an unexpected experience.
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