The Stack

You know, it would have been cool dramatic irony if I had posted my writeup of this game just before the judging deadline. Ah well. Spoilers follow the break.

Another Twine CYOA piece, this time a little meta. The premise is that the PC is trying to scrape together a last-minute entry to the IF Comp. You select a couple of objects from the protagonist’s room as inspirations for the hero and villain, like the seeds for an improv comedy routine, and he puts together a wacky little story about them with maybe two choices in it. The few stories I’ve seen seem to be entirely hand-built around the hero/villain pair, and I’m guessing that the complete grid of possibilities is represented. But it all feels appropriately off-the-cuff and low-effort, which probably hurt it in the Comp, and definitely didn’t inspire a great deal of replay on my part. Still, it’s more amusing than some of the games that take themselves more seriously.

It’s worth noting that in the initial section, when you’re picking the story seeds, you can more or less wander around through the apartment’s nodes freely. This means it must be tracking some internal state beyond the current node to remember what you picked for the story’s hero. So Twine really is more powerful than static HTML after all!