The Play

The Play won me over with its strong cast of characters, stylization, and comedy. In this story, you play as a director for a local theatre production. Opening day is tomorrow, and nothing is going right. With inexperienced actors, tension between cast members, a lack of fitting costumes and props, and bizarre improvisation, you have to make sure everything works as smoothly as it can.

The game switches styles between a formally written play script detailing sections of the performance, and prose for the sections where you are given backstory or choices. Also, some words can be clicked for a bit of extra background detail, which is a nice option. For the ending, there's a neat capper where you are given a review of the play based on what you decided to go with. The sidebar also lists the crew members and what their current mood is. The choices do all build up and impact the story, but you don't feel pressured that you could miss out on something big, and a single playthrough is short enough that you could easily play it a few times to see what else you can do.

What sells the writing for me is that while we only see a day in this troupe's life, we can already get a good understanding of their dynamic just from how they talk to each other and what they do during the rehearsal. The story is full of little references to previous experiences they've had, including some peculiar credits that go mostly unexplained ("The Ballad of Benji Benjamino", "last month's run of Much Alarm About Agnes"). The writing is very confident and doesn't slow down with unneeded exposition.

This is easily one of my favorite choice-based games I've played, and it deserves all the recommendation it gets.