Demon Hatching

Demon Hatching is a story-over-puzzle effort with three links in it at one critical point. You are, unsurprisingly, a demon who hatches in a forest, and you run up against a human much bigger than you are. You have three choices, to run away, to fight or to scream. Of course, there's a bit of buildup beforehand, describing what you are and what you are doing there, and at least part of what you want and fear and so forth.

The narrative breaks make it so that nothing is spoiled, and you get to see the story unfold at a good place. It's well worth it to cycle back and try in the other options to get a better character sketch of the main character and the human.

Ink games do seem to have that little something extra focused on the craft of writing, and that was evidenced here, and it certainly made me interested enough to try and follow the Tumblr snippet it mentioned it was based on. I can certainly see it evolving into something larger, and I'd be interested in that, too.

This is a brief Ink game entered in the Single Choice jam.

You play as a creature newly formed, emerged from a chrysalis. Being exposed to the brave new world, the creature must adapt quickly, especially since a human approaches.

The game is very short, but the writing is solid, from an alien perspective. Despite the single choice, there is real agency, as all of the endings give logical but not straightforward.

Brief but enjoyable.

Waking up in a strange land can be perturbing. Realising your body does not look right, feels all kind of wrong. Finding yourself in the presence of a stranger by your bedside, terrifying. So what do you do? What can you do?

This short game gives you three choices, branching the story towards three different ends. Funnily, these choice kind of represent the Freeze, Fight, Flight behaviour we have when faced with a stressful situation.

The writing balanced quite well the more horrory/odd elements of the character, especially compared to the human they are facing. There was an interesting focus on how bodies should look like, the transformation of bodies, and how the character’s body felt wrong - adding to the uneasiness of the situation.

Visual wise, the game uses the basic UI of Ink, putting focus on the text. Still, it made some interesting styling choices, with the honeycomb link.