Thousand Lives

This is a series of short snapshots (about 400 words each) of a Polish woman's life from age 19-ish in 1965 to her death in 2019, with most chapters encompassing about a decade. So it's necessarily sparse, but it paints an effectively personal portrait of Poland's history. Despite the viewpoint, the long time spans and short length of each chapter (and possibly the no-nonsense reporting of the writing style?) kept me at a little distance from the character. We're not living these years with her: we're dropping into her life occasionally to make a choice. The once a decade Christmas lettter, if you will. But I found it an interesting series of snapshots.

I wasn't entirely sold on the daily delivery by e-mail: it does force you to take a little time with it rather than clicking through the whole thing in 15-20 minutes, but I'm not sure how much difference that made to me. And it's implemented so that you get the next e-mail 24 hours after you respond to the last one. So it'll be later each day (possibly much later, if you don't get to the e-mail right away) and that was a nuisance: I ended up skipping days twice on my first playthrough. It would have been nicer to have it at the same time every day.

It's very branchy; I'd guess that it's nearly a full time cave. All the chapters seem to be binary choices about how you respond to some critical event. The first choice felt wildly unbalanced, which is unfortunate because most of the others feel much more natural and less forced, not so "well, I guess we need a choice here."

I enjoyed my time with it: I played it once in April and then again this month, and I might well go back and do it again sometime. It's a nice viewpoint on the history and it's not a big time commitment: it's just spread out over a week.