The Lighthouse's Tale

The Lighthouse's Tale is yet another Twine "game" that isn't a game but is instead a (very) short story.

Since the prose was so good, I really don't want to discourage the author with a strongly negative review of their first interactive fiction. If this was another one of those click-through collections of sentence fragments—"Darkness. You're falling. Flash of light! You hit the ground. Get Up."—I would have really unleashed a scathing tirade. I'm so sick of those.

At some points, it did feel just a tad bit like the author was flexing vocabulary muscles before a vanity mirror making what would otherwise have been a good, descriptive passage sound a bit sappy, a bit forced.

I rated The Lighthouse's Tale two stars instead of one for its use of complete, well-written sentences. The highest I've ever went with one of these not-games is three stars, and that was for the incomparable, award-winning Ex Nihilo, a work that's in a whole 'nother ballpark from The Lighthouse's Tale.

All that said, I'm not the best person to review this type of literary work and its for that reason that I omitted my rating from the game's average. Apparently, there are a number of Twine fans who like this sort of thing, but I'm certainly not one of them.

I want interactive fiction where interactive means something much deeper than just "click, click, click, click . . ." I want a game. I want to have fun. Sure, teach me what you want, impart your message to humanity if you must, astound me with your linguistic gymnastics or glamor me with flashy text graphics to the brink of giving me a seizure, but if at the end of the day it isn't a fun IF game, then I'm passing.


—Richard Sharpe