A Bottle from the Future

This game features the same story in three languages (Italian, English, and Slovak).

The story has a strong environmental message. It seems to branch at several spots, so I may have only seen part of the story, but in my version, I received a message warning me about devastating environmental impacts of current human activity, and was able to visit Atlantis to see what happened to them in the past.

The game is primarily focused on a sense of wonder and on hammering in the importance of keeping the environment safe.

The game uses a variety of colors and background images as decorations. I found these to be a little distracting, as sometimes they were so detailed or bright that it was a little hard to read.

I think this might be the author's first effort, in which case it is impressively polished.

You chance upon a bottle, one which carries an important message about a city which destroyed itself.

A Bottle from the Future is a game with an environmental message. You have plenty of choices, from ignoring warnings given to trying to pursue them, which in fact reflects the decisions we can make in real life with regards to the coming environmental crisis. There is a good amount of branching, and also a quiz, a puzzle which I brute forced, a link to a carbon footprint calculator and so on. Ultimately, it carries some important messages about learning from the past and deciding between action and inaction.

That said, I’m taking off a star due to the game’s presentation style. Some of the text is overlaid against a colorful picture, which looks pretty from a distance but make the text really painful to read. At some parts, boxes are put behind the text to improve readability, but some of the selections for color contrast really hurt my eyes. I appreciate the design work, and I personally understand (from making my own crappy art) how hard it is to balance colors with readability at times. Still, I think even taking away that massive picture and using something more low key for a background would have been better.

There is a fair bit of replayability with different options and branching. The game also does a good job of conveying its message. Still, some parts can be pretty tough on the eyes.

A short Twine game about a narrator who goes down to the sea one day and sees a bottle with a message in it, washed up on the shore. Instead of being a fun activity, the idea of opening the bottle fills the narrator with trepidation: it seems to contain knowledge of their own fate. I’m curious to know why the narrator is so certain that the bottle contains great power, and I think the story could play with this idea a bit more. Does the bottle fill the narrator with a sense of dread, even a foreboding of evil, when they pick it up? Or are they in a state of mind where they believe that any action they take, however small, is of great consequence, that they will have a terrible effect on the world around them?

The text is set against background graphics. I felt that the opening background didn’t fit the beginning of the text: something more placid, like a beach on a sunny day, would have been more appropriate, with the red mushroom cloud being more suitable later in the story, depending on the choices you make.

I played through a couple of different choices before I took the right path and found out who had sent the message: this felt satisfying; it was nice that I had to work a little to discover what the story was really about. In a novel twist for an IF, I got a little test on what I had read, which linked an ancient myth to the great problems of today.