Bender Lyfe

When people come across systems for writing choice-based stories, and then start writing a quick first game without much forethought, usually one of two things happen. Either the author focuses fully on exploring the system, neglecting the narrative and creating a game that goes like: 'You're on a street. Do you go left or right?' Or the author becomes somewhat giddy with all the possibilities offered by a branching story, creating a game that goes in all kinds of directions without forming a meaningful whole. Bender Lyfe is very much that second type of game.

Our protagonist is an aspiring football (soccer) player who is almost late for high school. Depending on where we go in the house, and what we do and do not investigate, we usually end up at one improbable death or another. The game is not without some humour in the form of dramatic irony; in one passage, we are given the opportunity to follow a man who tells us that he has candy in the back of his windowless unmarked van, something that doesn't set off any alarms for our protagonist. This unwise course of action in fact leads to a very unexpected (Spoiler - click to show)death by watching too much football.

If one is willing to click through all the choices in this very short game, one can even find a happy ending that involves... football. But there is not much reason to make this effort.