Animalia

McT's Interactive Fiction Reviews

Just after the sacrifice of a human child to the Forest God, the animals realize they might have made a mistake. Someone’s gonna come looking. To that end, they create a lifesize replica of the child powered by four animals inside it. It’s up to you to save the Taiga.

What follows is a highly branching choice game that is much much bigger than it first seems. Our first choice is to select which four animals are going to populate the human suit. Our selection informs some of the text and choices from that point onwards, the game branches outwards. The game does frequently resort to one of my least favorite choice mechanics: big lumps of expository text revealed paragraph by paragraph or sentence by sentence on clicking a random word highlighted in the text. I can’t help thinking – what’s the point?

But this is a minor nitpick in a funny, clever, branching, complex, well implemented game. 9/10.