The Morning After The Night Before

The Morning After the Night Before is to all intents and purposes a "my crappy apartment" game in Twine. You wake up after a bender and presumably have to figure out what happened last night, though there is little actual investigation done. There is something of a puzzle (finding the key so you can go outside), which is good as far as it goes, but that is pretty much all there is to it. The rest of it is "my crappy apartment"-text. It's not noticeably badly written, just extremely bland.

The tags promise a twist, so I played to the end looking for the reveal that, for example, I was Donald Trump all along. Instead I got (Spoiler - click to show)one of the most cliché storylines of modern games, the zombie apocalypse. It's not particularly scarily written. There are prior hints that something is wrong outside the apartment, but again, they fail to build up any really ominous atmosphere. It was almost enough to make me wonder whether I'd missed something.

I don't want to be too harsh. Like I said, the writing isn't actively bad, and there are no bugs. The "my crappy apartment" genre isn't bad in itself: some excellent works have started out with a similar premise. And I always enjoy puzzles and puzzle-like elements (such as needing to find an item to proceed) in Twine games.

We all have to start somewhere, and there are much worse first games than this.