Not Just Once

The game seems simple at first glance: the player watches their character walking home on a winter's night. A phone box rings. Will the character pick up the phone and talk to whoever is on the line, or will they just go home?

It's a well-worn premise, but what makes the game unique is its implementation. What I've described is a synopsis of events, but before the player even picks up the phone, they're already choosing what the character will eat and drink for dinner. A box of salad and lager, perhaps? Or a pizza with white wine?

And when the player has the character pick up the phone and speak, they can control the tone of the conversation. The appearance of the player character is determined by answering some choices in the game. The endings seem to be different depending on the choices made.

Not Just Once is a game about an encounter that can spiral into different outcomes depending on the player's choices. The amount of choices to ground the player is impressive. What felt like unnecessary choices ended up being relevant in some passages, depending on the path you took. It's quite refreshing to play a game that tries to integrate what I choose for dinner into the narrative.

That said, I find the UI quite odd and awkward. Unlike other Twine games I've played, the entire text is one long scrolling page that unfolds after each choice -- much like an Ink game published for the web. However, because there are so many choices, and the browser doesn't autoscroll, it's quite irritating to navigate. The game encourages multiple playthroughs, but the UX definitely makes me less interested in playing it more than three times.

I also wonder if I care about these choices. While it's nice to see that my choices actually affect some of the gameplay, I ultimately don't care what I choose. There are some choices that also cut the game short (most notably leaving the phone booth without any action), which is a nice thing to include -- but when I first played the game and reached it, I thought that was it. It was not until I read some reviews about it that I decided to give it another try and explore it more thoroughly. It seemed to me that the choices didn't matter because they didn't really feel like they should matter -- they felt like choices that personalized my journey a bit and nothing more.

This is still quite an ambitious first work. Creating these many choices and influencing the journey in some way is very neat. Despite its simple premise, it manages to evoke a strange, tantalizing atmosphere -- I hope the author makes more games in this style because I can see them coming up with something more complex and evocative in the near future.