Contrition

This twine game is inspired by Pacian's Weird City Interloper. In both games, you use keywords in different locations to advance the story.

In this game, you have a few locations, and an inventory. Both are dynamic. You move to a new area and use a new item. Being porpentine, the inventory includes things like emotions.

Overall, the mechanic was nice, and the vaguely futuristic surrealism worked for me. However the overall gameplay turned into repeatedly cycling through the inventory in every location, hoping for something to pop out. An interesting experiment

Anyway, you got your typical Porpentine urban/medieval/futuristic dirty/slimy/barren wasteland which reveals itself interestingly by adding interaction words to a menu as you explore. If you LISTEN in the first area, that lets you GOSSIP and then SKULK, and you have access to an increasing list of areas where you can LISTEN, GOSSIP, and SKULK and acquire new buttons like KEY and DEVOTION and HORROR. Basically each one of these is potentially a sensory description of the location you are in and an action, but you won't know until you click, and it doesn't matter because there's not much you're going to do wrong by just clicking. Getting new interaction words and then revisiting locations where you didn't have them before is the bulk of exploration. I never felt like I was doing anything intelligently with this, just click every interaction, find a new area, go to that one and click every word, loop back if I have a word I didn't try in an original area. I like this as a prototype for a larger work.

Porpentine excels at visceral imagery and making Twine do what she wants. I don't think she's interested in story cohesion or character development. Perhaps it's a flavor you either get or you don't, and this type of thing over and over is obviously not intended for me. I appreciate and admire the imagination and HTML skills that go into her works, but I don't feel in any way affected at the end as many other people are. Does that make me a monster?