Evita Sempai

Evita Sempai centres around one woman's adoration/love for Eva Perón, who was the first lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952. It is told in a series of episodes from the narrator's perspective, centred around encounters with Perón.

This game has social relationships at its core, but where other games allow us to manipulate our position in those relationships, the narrator of Evita Sempai already has a predefined position in her social circle. Dropping the player in all these relationships in medias res felt a little disorienting at first, but it also helped to flesh out a fully-formed protagonist who was not only in love with Eva Perón, but also a sister, daughter and breadwinner.

I went into this game without any knowledge of who Eva Perón was, but it's not strictly necessary. Context will certainly explain the later events in this game, and perhaps explain other NPCs' reactions to the titular first lady.

I found the narrator's relationships with NPCs difficult to follow initially, but this is really a minor quibble. Evita Sempai is neatly styled, with changing backgrounds highlighting the transitions between sections.

I am a sucker for local detail and this game does a nicely subtle job of it, even though (to my memory) city and place names are almost never mentioned. Evita Sempai explores a real-life setting not often found in IF, which is definitely something I'd like to see more of.

This game has a nice choice of background and font. It is a mostly linear Twine game with a slow, deliberate pace. The text often appears on a slow timer, and the links that don't progress the story are generally reflective cycles. Both of these design choices force the reader to contemplate the game at a relaxed pace.

The story offered several surprises to me. I found it to be well-developed, a description of one woman's lifetime. Everything was understated and hinted at rather than pushed through.

My only issues with the game were that I felt that the placement of links and the available choices didn't make me feel involved in the story, and that the story could have been more descriptive. I only feel comfortable mentioning these flaws, though, because the rest of the game did such a good job.

This is a short story, nostalgic, bittersweet, and burned at the edges with a war candle type of story. It's about a woman who falls in love with another woman, who's more powerful, in a historic Argentina that most people don't know about. It's also a family drama, the main character isolated and alone knowing she's kind of like the black sheep of the family being the only one who is unmarried. Now, I have read some South American literature that took place in Chile, but not much about Argentina. But I know what happened was very tragic and similar in the fact that it had to do with corrupt government and war (although i could be wrong on this.) And this story gives a slight glimpse. The story is beautifully written, if you take out the CSS, you would probably find it as novelette in one of those artsy small presses I love so much that sell translated Latinx literature.

Pros: beautiful CSS and writing.
Cons: mmm can't think of any except there was a bug towards the end of the game causing me to switch browsers. Which isn't that big of an issue because it's not unknown that Twine doesn't work in certain browsers.