Interview Interview

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 7 April 2025.

This is an episodic Twine game about interviews, and the choices you can make during them, and how you are perceived.

Initially I was thrown by the opening, not what I expected. But then the story runs through a sequence of chapters, each with an original take on the idea of an interview, while also moving the plot and your character’s story forward.

It’s nicely done, and the player has choices about whether to deliberately shape how they are presented, or to give perhaps more honest and personal answers.

The later parts of the game are interesting and unexpected, in a way that totally surprised me. But also made me think.

At the very end you can see statistics about the overall pattern of your choices and achievements you unlocked.

Note the game has ambient music for much of it, but I found listening to this very distracting as I was trying to read the text on screen. So I turned my sound off.

It starts off pretty entertainingly. You attend a series of interviews (not just the job interview kind) and get to pick from one of four responses ranging from professional to cringe. The writing was really entertaining, and I was seriously flirting with the idea of giving five stars at that time. The section on a romantic date left a silly grin on my face for some time.

Meanwhile, I was wondering about the lizard on the cover art. However, the answer came soon.

I'm not sure what I should say about the story's ending. I don't know if it's just so brilliant that my small brain can't comprehend it, or if it was just a dumb idea. (Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that the whole thing was just a reptile dreaming about human life, then a play about that reptile dreaming about human life, then a reptile dreaming about that play about the reptile which was... aaargh. Ok, I think that's all the layers. It was just multiple levels of the 'just a dream' trope, and I'm not sure if there's some brilliance somewhere I'm missing.

That said, the earlier parts were still very entertaining to read. I'm giving four stars for that. Now, I need some time to unscramble my brain.