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Review
Nose Bleed is an unsettling short IF work that explores the themes of social anxiety and debilitating self-doubt through an interesting conceit: you've got a nosebleed and, no matter what you do, it won't go away. The nosebleed quickly escalates from nuisance to horrific, and there's some strange, almost disembodied descriptions of your attempts to lick, rub, and ignore the blood seeping from your orifice.
The game is written in a Twine-like system (update: actually, it's written in TextureWriter, a system I'm not familiar with; but this game has the feel of a classic Twine game), but has a neat game mechanic to advance the story. Rather than clicking on links, the player is presented with 2-3 verbs in boxes at the bottom of the screen and drags them around to a corresponding word or phrase on the page. This helps to reinforce the tension of wanting to take control of the situation -- the verb that you're grabbing -- and the helplessness of inability, as any attempt to avert or address the situation inevitably results in only worsening the situation.
The player character's nosebleed is soon noticed by a coworker and, once the PC is shuttled to a company event, their nosebleed becomes an embarrassing distraction for everyone. While I found the plot intriguing -- and definitely effective in communicating the main themes of the work -- this is ultimately where I felt Nose Bleed was not fully realized. The office job setting where the nosebleed starts out is very generic and not described in any specific detail. The narrator's internal monologue likewise feels underdeveloped and lacking a lived-in tone or voice.
In part, the work is going for a surreal vibe and does not want to place the story in a fully realistic setting -- this is something like a nightmare, a vision of a hell. In that respect, this work reminded me a lot of Andrew Plotkin's Shade -- but Shade is so effectively precisely because the surreal nightmarish elements settle in over a concretely realized apartment. If Nose Bleed had a fully realized character and setting, the monstrous nosebleed that serves as an externalization of social anxiety and self-doubt would be even more powerful.
