Two Hours to Midnight

I was having a mental mini-crisis before playing this game. I had found that I hadn't been interested in playing IF as much in the last week, and wondered if I just wasn't enjoying the field as much as a whole or just the individual games I had been playing.

I sorted IFDB by latest publication to see what interesting games were newest and to see if there was any pattern. I was surprised to see a game had been released less than an hour ago, and by Jacqueline Ashwell. I've liked several of her games before, like the Fire Tower and her Fingertips game, but she hadn't released anything this decade.

But no, it was a new game. Booting it up, I thought, 'okay, this is the kind of IF I like. It's the kind of well-implemented strongly voiced style that was really prominent in the 00's.

I was slightly dismayed to see that the game invited you to follow specific actions in real life. I haven't really engaged will with games like that in the past. I didn't, I'm afraid, draw sigils on my arm when playing With Those We Love Alive and I didn't relate to the self-help in a recent IFComp game designed to help with heartbreak.

So I did skip a step or two in the instructions (I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my son and there's not a lot of space for turning off lights or shutting out sound), but I followed the journaling part. It was really therapeutic; I realized that I had had a huge number of positive and great things happen to me this year, and that the bad things that happened I could be proactive about next year (like getting proactive car maintenance). So I found that very satisfying.

This was a good interaction and restored my faith in IF and helped me decide my next move in IF (I was debating whether to release my new game I'm working on into IFComp next year, meaning I wouldn't be able to help out that year, or in a different competition, but I've realized I enjoy the helping out aspect a lot, so I'll release it separately).