Lilium

The only place where this game is still available is ifarchive. The website that hosted it is gone, which I feel like is a fitting end to the story.

This is a story about relationships mediated through the internet. The protagonist is a college student who meets a slightly older woman on an online forum. They bond via fiction writing and anime fandom, and the college student develops a deep crush. Everything about the story feels incredibly real and human, and the writing carries it through. It's a story about adolescence and impermanence and death, about how people change and grow apart. It just really spoke to me, I guess, as someone who grew up on the internet.

Lilium was originally written for the Naked Twine Jam in 2014, which was supposed to host Twine games without fancy formatting and styles. This game fits; it uses the default Twine theme with blue links and nothing else. There is not much that can be found about the jam online anymore, and half of the games submitted appear to be permanently gone. I'm just glad this game was able to make it through.