creak, creak

I learned that this is an entry for a micro-writing contest, where all entries must be 300 words or less. Given that my only issue was the length, I am giving this five stars for the format that it is intended for.

**Original review**
This is not so much a game as it is a way of presenting a short, scary story. It is very-well crafted while it lasts, but there are only one or two real choices in the game, and they don't make a large difference.

I want to be clear that the game is exceptionally well developed and put together--but I expect that most people playing interactive fiction are looking for something much longer than this.

In recent months Chandler Groover has produced quite a number of unusual works, with quite a few edging into horror territory. creak, creak is a Twine work written for Twiny Jam which bears some similarities to Tailypo, another of Groover's works.

Something is creaking in the house. Your mother always said it's just the wind. You can't leave it at that. You have to look.

Groover uses timed appearance of text and various transitions to pace out the story, to great effect here. I found myself with a creeping sense of dread as I waited for the text to appear. The writing style is simple and some of the rhyming lines give the sense of a child's nursery rhyme - making the monster a creature of a child's nightmares, a la The Badabook.

This game may be a baby sibling of more full-fledged horror games, but creak, creak packs quite a punch and works well for such a constrained format.

A two star rating? Ahhuhhhh.. no, I really don't think so..

This game was a nice surprise for me because I'm a fan of untangled sequencing and writers with the discipline to also be effective editors. The stylistic methods I recognized were employed well, from a structural standpoint this is a very tidy project, obviously exploiting use of the reader's capacity for imagination with the conservative descriptions. Pace, suspense and atmosphere are three concepts this game conveys particularly well and the bare writing emphasizes their importance. Overall an intelligent and deliberate project concentrated into something short, sweet and significant in spite of how few materials it required to construct.

I like this. I appreciate what the text choses not to say which isn't something I often get to enjoy. I've looked at a couple of other pieces of your work and the quality seems pretty promising, so hopefully you'll share some other projects in the future with us!