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Review
Footnotes in Ashes is a short story about a man lost at sea with his dead wife's ashes. Presented in six short chapters, it is not in any real sense interactive, and there are no alternative endings or different paths to take through the story. The reader advances the story by clicking on super-scripted references which reveal footnotes at the bottom of each page. The footnotes reveal more information, and sometimes a link to the next chapter. It's all a bit unengaging. The unnamed man and his wife remain ciphers, barely sketched in, and without any real agency the story becomes a game of hunt-the-link-to-the-next-chapter. I can't be sure, but I suspect there are one or two bugs in the implementation. It's hard to know whether they are bugs or deliberate text effects; at one point, for instance, footnotes from a previous chapter reappear, seemingly out of context. Towards the end, a genuine error message appears:
Error: <<audio>>: track "thunder" does not exist
With a bit more polish some might find this an interesting short story, but it's not really interactive fiction.
