Stowaway

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 5 April 2025.

Starting with this one, a short Ink story, where you’re a stowaway on a ship, creeping around at night, seeing what you can discover and do.

I was surprised at the start that the game is set in the seventeenth century and the Caribbean. There isn’t much of a feel of the time and place in the story itself. There are also some anachronisms, such as a piano being played (too early). But these pale into insignificance against the creative leaps of imagination the game takes you to.

There are many endings to find. I tried to find as many of them as possible. One ((Spoiler - click to show)performing the ritual) was particularly satisfying to find. Many of the endings come from the branching choice structure. But also from how you can use objects that you discover to further the plot and choice options. It’s a lot of fun.

On the downside the game needs some more polish in coding. It lets you repeat doing things over and over again, with exactly the same responses. Eg if in a given location you select option X which gives you a certain piece of text together with a new item, you get that exact same text and new item on repeated choices of that option.

But it is a lot of fun. A creative and imaginative piece of work. It almost feels like a parser game, in the way you find objects and get extra options to use them.

A fun start!