Virgin Space

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Virgin Space is a special effort to bring hypertext to several platforms at once, including e-readers. The format is superb, going beyond what gamebooks can achieve, all that beautifully rendered. The format is crafted with care and a nice visual design.

The story is brief. This is the length of a short tale but, personally, I liked it a lot. It even packs some puzzles!

Very recommended.

Now some notes on kindle ergonomics... There's a trend out there stating that interactive fiction didn't flourished in e-books and why. I have my own opinions: don't trust walled gardens. Old kindles are awful to navigate links, and Amazon never went to fix that.

Probably for modern, touchy e-readers this would work really fine. But if possess the good old Kindle, one has to navigate all those letters using the cursor, and then "double click" to fully proceed to the link destination. A Chorus! In the end I got accustomed to it (like we get accustomed to other elaborated interfaces, like the parser, or Killer 7 control scheme). In the end you are traversing the text to select the links, and that's just fine.

I'm eager to read more stories of this Textagames format.

I really enjoyed the presentation of this game. It has background music, and an animated star background.

It has a different emphasis then most space sci-fi, almost like a space retelling of some fairy tale. The worldbuilding is good, with weird creatures. The writing was evocative and clear, although there were a few tonal decisions that I think might have come from the translation. I got stuck on the main puzzle for longer than I had thought I would, but I finished the game in about 15 or 20 minutes.

There's an itch version and an e-reader version, which is nice for people looking for more interactivity on the Kindle.