Thousand Lives

It’s a common human foible to spend a lot of time contemplating the past decision points in one’s life and thinking about how differently things could have gone, and accordingly it’s a common theme in fiction—even more so in interactive fiction, where the audience can actually play out the experience of making different choices and seeing how things go. I would go so far as to call this a staple of interactive fiction, going back to the days of Alter Ego.

Thousand Lives, as its title suggests, revolves partly around this thematic concern; the rest of its core focus is Polish history, from the post-WWII era to the 2010s. It offers five sets of binary choices with simple branching—it doesn’t seem to have state-tracking more sophisticated than what you could accomplish by saying “turn to page 40.” But its gameplay does have a unique twist, which is that the installments are delivered to the player by email, once a day. After making a choice, the player must wait 24 hours to see the results.

This is an intriguing design choice that has the opportunity to make the player slow down and really engage with the story, and think over their choices carefully in a way they may not be inclined to do if they can easily start over and choose differently. Pulling against this, however, is the fact that the pace of the narrative itself is quite breezy, covering a decade or more per installment in just a few hundred words.

This does give a sense of the tumult of this period of Polish history; things are happening fast, changing sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and often leaving ordinary people like the PC feeling like they have little control over their situations. (Or perhaps I’m just projecting the way I often feel about living through politically interesting times.) The game also seems to have educational aims, and this broad overview serves to get a lot of events in and give players a lot of keywords to use for their own research should they wish to look further into recent Polish history.

On the other hand, the all-summary, no-scene style is somewhat detrimental to emotional investment and the ability to really inhabit the PC. After completing a playthrough, I still don’t have a very strong sense of her as a person, much less any of the other characters that dip in and out of the story. But then again, many players probably wouldn’t appreciate longer and/or more granular installments in what seems to be a game designed to be played in bite-sized chunks in moments of downtime, so this is ultimately a matter of preference.

I played through once, choosing to move to the city and go into politics (among other things), and did find it interesting from a historical perspective. From discussion I’ve seen, it seems there are many other strongly divergent paths the PC’s life can take, touching on other corners of the 20th-/early 21st-century Polish experience. I might play again, but the desire to see what other lives the PC could have lived is more rooted in historical curiosity than attachment to her as a character. Still, I would absolutely say Thousand Lives is worth playing through at least once—and it won’t take very much time out of your day.