My Name is Tara Sue

This is one of the most visually appealing stories made in Twine. If you have difficulty reading due to certain fonts or text layouts, as I do, this format works so well. Color choices, placement of text, and length of passages were great.

As to the story itself I found myself getting really invested in "Your" well being. The depiction of mundane existence is aided by text appearance and passage structure, so that you feel the way mundane choices weigh in your mind. Another example is the path of angering your boss. You see the anger build and I found deep satisfaction in the choice to literally just walk away and leave him standing there like an idiot. Most stories would have "You" cowering, but it felt so empowering to just have that option. What is in the story is great and makes for a fascinating read.

However other reviewers are kind of right. Despite the pros of the writing and the nice way passages are written there are issues. What most stands out is some choices in the text are kind of arbitrary, which on one hand serves to reinforce the importance of every day decisions. However, a fair number of those choices seem so minute, but have a massive impact on the story directions. At the same time some major decisions simply don't matter. What compounds this is while the game says there are ten endings after six play through most of them only differ by where you die and I got many of the same endings twice, and I wasn't quite sure what to do different, by the sixth play through it seemed like all the endings were leading to basically the same sort of ending, so I kind of lost interest. That being said the endings I did see were well-written, and I particularly liked the more abrupt "teddy" ending, but even that was brought about by arbitrary choices.


That aside it was still satisfying, and held my interest for a while. I will probably try again to get the endings later.