The End of the Line

This game was made for Shufflecomp.

In it, you play as someone on a train who is approached by another passenger. He wants to tell you stories of the six other travellers who had spent time on the train before getting off.

The game uses Decker, and has a fixed width retro font.

The stories are very diverse, and build towards the ending stories, those of you and the storyteller. Each story seems to focus on personal relationships, either in pairs or threes.

The writing was solid, and the stories made sense, but something felt missing for me that I can't put my finger on. Almost like buying a box of legos and finding that most of them are already one big molded piece, like bionicles or something. After reading each story, it was hard to say what each one was about. Maybe it was because people were acting in them not as real, flesh and blood people, but as archetypes, like reading a story about tarot cards or astrological signs.

With each participant given a playlist of songs to be inspired by and to use as a base for their entry, this game does not only take inspiration from all songs, but the theme of the jam itself. Through a sequence of snippets, which you can read in order or at random (like a playlist!), each inspired by a song, you get to uncover the backstory of different characters, they trials and tribulations, and maybe their ending (which you can choose).

The story takes on an interesting turn after you go through all snippets, as a way to link all stories together. Didn't see the twists coming.

The interface, made through Decker, is pretty interesting: showcasing each story in the form of a "deck of cards", with a retro/pixellated aesthetic. It gave me a bit of a StoryNexus vibe, with the story selection.
The game also provides the option of a "cheat" mode, to be able to re-read the stories and choose different outcomes for each characters without having to go through the whole game again.

This was neat!