my father's long, long legsby michael lutz2013 Horror Twine
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I'm kind of torn on this one. For most of the game, I was thinking "Why is this not just a short story?" It would stand on its own pretty well- there are a few notable grammatical errors, and I think it could have been cut down a little, but if I'd read it on r/nosleep or the like, I would have upvoted it. But as a game- or even as interactive fiction- it seemed to fall a little short. Most of the interactivity consisted of clicking on a word to read the next paragraph, which, ehhhhnnn. There were some points where you had to wait for words to appear, which worked okay.
But then! The end! The end was great! A really effective use of sound and there was one effect that I'd never seen before and worked really really well! Excellent job on that! I just wish there had been more- maybe different sounds based on the options you chose in the dark? And because the lead-up was so long, it felt a little unbalanced. I think it would have worked better if the story had been a bit punchier, and/or if there were some other ways that it took advantage of the medium throughout. I think using the final mechanism only at the end makes a lot of sense, but I think some subtler effects- sound, or even something as simple as changing the background color for some sections- just anything so I don't spend the majority of the story wondering why it wasn't just a regular short story. The ending answered that for me, but the fact that I spent so much time thinking about that at all undermined the experience for me.