The Stack

The randomizer seems to be giving me all the Twine clustered at the beginning. Spoilers follow the break.

Told in laconic vignettes, this is basically a prose poem about life and stoner food. At the bodega, you help two potheads select items in four categories (cookies, chips, beverages, and ice cream). Each item triggers a snippet of banter and a brief flashback. Once you’ve made all your selections, an interesting thing happens: there’s a perspective shift. Suddenly, instead of a disembodied reader who directs choices without being part of them, you’re the checkout clerk, who doesn’t like Sam and Leo particularly. Each item you selected earlier is presented with a quip that echoes the earlier dialogue, but your only options at this point are “nod” and “smile”, token gestures of toleration. Which, frankly, was kind of my reaction to the stoner philosophizing in the earlier dialogue anyway.

It’s worth noting that there’s a lot of variant text here that you won’t see on one visit to the bodega. Every time you go to the ice cream section, for example, you get a paragraph or so about Sam and Leo noticing a poster about Trayvon Martin there and reacting to it, but this text is chosen at random form a pool. This makes replay more interesting, which is good, because it definitely encourages replay — it’s very short, and looping back to the beginning is offered diegetically, as our heroes run out of food and make another bodega run, their lives an endless loop.

In short, it feels like a trifle, but there’s some art going on here.