Restore, Reflect, Retry

This game is one of the most unusual commercial Choicescript games. It's much shorter than usual (at 90K words), is intended to be replayed several times for the full experience (rather than just finding different paths), and is self-referential.

In it, you play as one of five friends in a kind of 'outcasts' group. You work a dead-end job with an awful boss, struggle with grades at school and the lack of love at home, and play a haunted video game with your friends that can lead to death.

In this game about a haunted game you can also play an interactive fiction game about a haunted game, which is pretty neat.

The game does have a mystery component in it, and replaying alone isn't enough to solve it, so once you're ready for it it's a good idea to 'get help from others' as the game suggests.

Clever concept. Only issue I had was that the beginning somehow felt hard to get through, and I had to try three different times over a few months to get into it enough to finish it. Glad I'm did.

I was a big fan of Theodoridou's Rent-a-Vice, so I was excited to see them come back with another Choice of Game title. RRR explores some similar themes as the previous game - the ethics of choice, porous boundaries between simulation and real life - but I like this one even more. Theorodoridou has wrapped this game in a sophisticated narrative structure, a game within a game, and you as the player are enmeshed along with the player characters. You are not just the voyeur, moving characters through a branching narrative, but you are actually implicated in trying to tease out the differences between the blurry layers reality and game.

The basic premise of RRR is that you and your friends have stumbled upon some secret game, and when you play it, you are actually in the gameworld - kind of Tron-esque - and things that happen in the gameworld have repercussions back into the real world. What I found really compelling about RRR is how Theorodidou translates this into a choice-based IF format. You play through different kinds of games, shooters and puzzlers, but you as the player navigate these experiences through the classic Choice of Games interface. This could be clunky or shallow, but Theodoridou absolutely pulls it off.

This part of the story is balanced with the playable character's real life, struggling to keep up with school, friends, family, and work while also trying to figure out a cursed game. The characters are well developed such that you feel the pull between the game within the game and the pressures of your daily life. Worrying about what you're going to do after high school or where you stand with your friends and family makes the stakes of the game within the game all that more real.

The mystery of the game within the game is very well crafted. You as the player learn more about the nature of this game that blurs the boundaries of reality along with the characters in the game. I actually haven't cracked it yet myself, but there's a puzzle that runs through the game that seems to unlock a secret ending if you're able to solve it. Even without solving that meta-puzzle, the game offers a satisfying - if still unresolved - experience.