Pageant

I played Pageant after reading the Autumn Chen interview in The Rosebosh IF magazine: https://the-rosebush.com/2023/07/autumn-interview/

I haven’t played a lot of IF games but I was intrigued by the simple premise of this game from 2020, and it seemed a good starting place.

I’ve now read it twice, and the world flavour is one I keep thinking about. Reminded me of my teenage years roving around the city, figuring out who to be with, what to like, what to dislike.

I found from time to time that I was jumped out of the story by the game mechanic. Some choices lead to repetition and you don’t know why. Some choices jump you in inconsistent ways as time passes. And sometimes, I didn’t feel like the possible responses were self consistent with the way the main character expressed themselves before. Also, occasional rants from characters seem out of place. Too heavy for the moment. But then, maybe that’s what I was like as a teenager too!!??

The first time I played, I succeeded in saving Emily. I was surprised and grateful to be given a list of other possibilities within the game to try and discover so I played again, and this time nearly won the Pageant.

With all interactive fiction, after play though I always want a God mode, to be able to explore the paths and reasoning I didn’t take without having to play the whole thing endlessly. I especially wanted one here. Why didn’t I win the pageant??!!

It was a nice touch to be shown the possibilities for the story, and to see that it was possible to navigate the story in many different ways yet still remain in the high school family life story world.


Definitely a good read.