The Thread

This is a short game that depicts a scenario that is all too human but phrased in fantastical terms: deciding whether to remain home with uncomfortable comforts or to strike out into the unknown and frightening outer world.

More specifically, you a young woman who has run into the woods in the hopes of finding a witch and leaving home behind. But that may be harder than you thought.

The writing is, to my taste, overwrought. This is subjective and not objective, but I think that the elaborate analogies and similes can get confusing. For instance your heartbeat is described as:

Your heart thuds in your chest, the reverberation of an ancient drum that has beat and beat and beat since the beginning of time. It echoes with the cries of a hundred anguished souls, tied by the same thread that follows you from home, stretching across acres of flat, empty land before it becomes a tangled mess in the trees that shield you from view.

I wasn't aware until after I had played and until I was writing this that (Spoiler - click to show)the thread mentioned here is 'real'-ish and story-important, while the ancient drum is not.

Similarly, we meet someone described thus:
(Spoiler - click to show)She smiles and the rows of her sharp teeth—thousands upon thousands of them, lining her palette and receding into her throat—shine and gleam in the total darkness.

Thousands is a lot! I looked up (Spoiler - click to show)how many teeth sharks have, since that's an animal with a lot of teeth, and they only have around 100 or 200, but the whale shark has thousands, and to fit them all in they're really, really tiny.

So I think that for my personal feelings the writing could be toned down a bit, but I did enjoy the setup and the choice, it was one of the better choices I've seen in this jam (the Single Choice Jam).