Funeral for a Friend

This game is interesting; I recently read Porpentine saying that they made parser games at first, and people didn't like them, so she moved to Twine.

I think that Twine is a better format for these stories; this story is fun, but I love the complete refreshing of the screen, the colored text and background, and the pacing of Twine as elements of Porpentine's stories. This story is good, and it works, but I think that Twine was a smart move.

In this game, you have a shovel, and you have to dig. The game can be won in 15 moves or less. In its implementation and feel, it felt like Pick up the Phone Booth and Die.

Apparently there is a grave-digging sub-genre in interactive fiction. Or maybe it's just this game and Ryan Veeder's Dig My Grave. In any case, both games wear their monotonous premise on the sleeve: your object is to dig, therefore you dig.

At first glance, Funeral for a Friend seems like it would function just as well as a Twine game, and you can see when you play it why Porpentine did move on to Twine to write most of her other titles. That format works conceptually for the experiences she usually wants to deliver. But at the same time, I don't think Funeral for a Friend would quite work as well in Twine, because the more open-ended parser interface makes the action of grave-digging feel that much more restrictive when it's pretty much all you can do. The same holds true for Veeder's Dig My Grave.

This game feels like a precursor to ALL I WANT IS FOR ALL OF MY FRIENDS TO BECOME INSANELY POWERFUL. It's got that same dour minimalism finally giving way to something more alive as the game ends, although the handling is much more lightweight in Funeral for a Friend, since this game is essentially an extended joke.

Time-wise, it takes less than five minutes to play.