A Bottle from the Future

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.