Not Just Once

Not Just Once is a well-written creepypasta choice game. There seem to be just two endings, so functionally there’s just one choice: play it safe, or keep playing it risky. Try it both ways.

There are some bugs. One time through, passages referred to past events that hadn’t happened; another time I was left stuck with no choices at all, thus no way forward. But because I was planning to review it, I played several times, and most play-throughs were fine so your odds are good.

Overall I enjoyed it and recommend giving it a try.

Continuing the review-a-thon run through the highlights of other events, we come to Not Just Once, which was intended as an entry in last year’s ShuffleComp revival, but missed the deadline. The conceit of ShuffleComp is that participants submit a couple of songs, the organizers shuffle them around, and then they hand a new selection back to the authors, who make a game based on some or all of the songs on their customized mini-mix-tape. Sadly for my ability to evaluate Not Just Once according to the rules of the Comp, I didn’t listen to the playlist listed by the author, which contained three songs from bands I’d never heard of, a Radiohead track that’s unfamiliar to me, and a Genesis song whose title meant nothing to me at the time though now that I go back and look at it again, I realize was on the adult contemporary station all the time when I was a kid.

Fortunately, Not Just Once stands on its own well enough. A Twine game gussied up with a stylish blue header and footer, it also boasts a customized interface where selecting a choice reveals a few new paragraphs and then scrolls down to the next set of options, making it play something like an Ink game with a better color palette. It also impresses with how quickly it establishes its downmarket UK setting:

"This is your local high street, although it barely deserves the title. Fully half the shop fronts are boarded up or to let. There’s a corner shop with overpriced groceries - that you’ve just come out of - an off-license, a phone repair kiosk, and a couple of charity shops (they closed mid-afternoon, though).

"Overhead, Christmas lighting flashes desultorily - alternating stylised LED gifts and trees, strung across the street. The local council’s festive offering, still in place."

There are a few small infelicities here (the “that you’ve just come out of” interjection is a little clumsy, and “desultorily” is always a mistake) but they’re drowned out by the evocatively sardonic turns of phrase and nicely-chosen details. The prose remains strong as the plot kicks in: a pay phone is ringing in its booth as you walk by, and after you feel drawn to pick it up, you unexpectedly find yourself thrust into a disorienting and intense conversation with a women who’s alluring as she is threatening, and who says she knows you though you’d swear you’ve never met her before in your life.

While the direction the story goes isn’t too hard to guess, the writing is effective at communicating your warring curiosity and wariness, and early choices that seemed merely incidental see call-backs that make the game feel responsive. Despite drawing on five different songs, it struck me as fairly one-note – modulo a bit of a twist in the ending and those couple minutes of setup before it shows its hand, Not Just Once is content to stick with a slow ratcheting up of its I-want-to-make-out-with-you-but-also-you-might-kill-me tension. But hey, that’s a fun note, and it’s well played here.

There are a few missed opportunities: many of the choices do feel like they reduce to “do you want the plot to keep happening Y/N”, which isn’t very interesting, and I was surprised the ending didn’t twist in the way I was expecting (Spoiler - click to show)(wouldn’t it have been more fun, and neater, if it had been the girl who answered the phone call at the end, except this time she’s the one with no memory of you?). And I think the pacing is perhaps five to ten percent slower than would be ideal; this is still a nervy little thriller, don’t get me wrong, but a little bit of tightening would pay significant dividends. But that’s often the way with mix-tapes: they can be a bit shaggy, but an enthusiastic mix of disparate elements will take you far.

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 25min, 5 playthroughs, 3 endings

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: DR. WHO PLAYS NO PART IN THIS WORK

This is a short piece about an odd encounter one winter night. I guess it is a slice of life kind of thing. Certainly the simple majority of my playthroughs led to a denouement that was essentially a low stakes, “well that was a weird memory, wasn’t it?” That’s not a problem. I mean short stories trade in that all the time, the intriguing but trivial anecdote in an otherwise offscreen life. No connection to anything else, just a wild thing to reflect on from time to time. I would say, the first three playthroughs were unevenly implemented, in the sense that it was no more or less remarkable whether I engaged the strange phone booth or not. In fact, some ending text PRESUMED I had gone way farther than I actually did, referring to a girl that particular playthrough had not encountered. (There was another weird instance of me opening cans when I had bought bottles.)

The other two playthoughs more interestingly justified the time, one developing into an unsettling stalker scenario, the next into a ‘random hookup gone wrong’ vibe. In both cases though, the narrative pulled WAY short of any significant consequences or backstory, just ended up being different flavors of ‘hn, that was weird.’ Lots of intriguingly suggestive details but no solid answers. I think your enjoyment of the piece will hinge on how open to these kinds of mini-narratives you are. There was no character arc in my playthrough, no dramatic crescendos or reveals, just some weird details that defied explanation. Like a story you might tell at a cocktail party, whose whole point is ‘here’s a weird thing that happened to me…’

I think this might be a stronger piece with some narrative throughlines. There are hints that the PC might have somehow done something bad in the past, or that the visitor intended something bad, but nothing came of either in my playthroughs. It is possible my mix of choices derailed any of that, but just as possible that the hints were the whole point of the piece and nothing more was there. The latter FEELS more consistent with the work, so if it was the former, a stronger authorial hand would need to show the cards a little more prominently.

But that seemingly was not the work’s aim and that’s fine. It ably accomplishes a Wierd Cocktail Party Anecdote simulation, which, if those were uninteresting, we’d never bring them up at parties would we?