Off the Rails

You're on the train to meet your family for the weekend, and the thought fills you with dread.

The cover suggests a cutesy story aimed at younger readers; the blurb suggests something deeper, with a hint of unhappy family life.

Vague allusions to emotional baggage (at least in the branches that I played through) and a mundane beginning taps on a common urge in IF, though not necessarily the most attention-grabbing. Infrequent binary choices are sprinkled in the midst of linear text. The sheer amount of linearity actually hides the broad branching, and players might be put off from replaying by the verbosity. Conciseness would have helped this game, but at least one of the branches is weird enough to warrant all this.

Off the Rails has some good ideas, but could be more compellingly presented.

This is a fairly long and polished Twine game with multiple branches, more or less in the Gauntlet style under Ashwell's classification system.

The game is centered around meekness. You are a milquetoast character on a train dealing with family issues and personal anxiety.

If you choose to, you can be sent on a small adventure, where you learn more about the possibilities in yourself.

The writing was engaging, but I felt like my choices didn't really matter (outside of Do you want to continue or Not), and I feel like they didn't drive the text forward. The concept was creative, though.