Yesterday, You Saved the World

[Time to completion: 15-20 minutes]

Yesterday explores what happens when the excitement over and the gilt is peeling. You are Lucy Newman, in eighth grade, but yesterday you were a Stellar Warrior. You had to face off The Void alone. And today, you have to wake up and go to school.

Two groups came to mind, reading this, who would probably identify with the PC strongly.

The first: those labelled as “gifted” in childhood. The burden of expectation from family, school, society lies on you, but you get all the wrong support. All the support to develop your abilities - to win all the competitions, ace all the exams - and too little to equip you emotionally and psychologically.

The second: those who do jobs that require them to run towards danger - emergency services, healthcare, mental health services, social work. You are the help that people call for. Sometimes you face things that terrify you, absolute disasters on a scale big or small, and you run out of resources, knowledge and wits. Yet, you can’t abscond from your responsibilities, and when you go back into the “normal world”, you have no words to explain to your friends outside this line

Structurally, Yesterday flashes back and forth between the PC’s life as a schoolgirl and her previous magical girl life. This is further set off by a parallel choice structure. Yesterday also uses the limited choices afforded by the CYOA format to illustrate character development.

Amongst many other things - a vivid protagonist, thoughtful design, a subversion on the magical girl narrative - Yesterday is a really good example of how a choice-based narrative can play with choices to reinforce the story.

In this game, you flash back and forth between two different times; yesterday, when you were a Stellar Girl, and now as a mundane human.

The game is mostly choosing the order of four options, moving to a new scene, and repeating. I found myself eager to know what happened the day before. I found the game exciting.

However, I didn't feel strongly connected to the protagonist, and I felt satisfied with my first playthrough without exploring more options.

Unusually elegant presentation/UI for a Twine game. It's a magical girl game, but you don't need to be familiar with the genre to enjoy it.

Until the end, this is dynamic fiction rather than interactive fiction, but the format carries the story well - there's a certain poetic rhythm to it. Still, the repetition can become frustrating.