I tried my hand at making a twine game of my own. You can play it by clicking here. It’s a little autobiographical and I hope it isn’t too depressing because I’m really blithe and fatalistic about the whole thing.

An excerpt

But seriously, you can play it on loop so all you do is wake up, play Candy Crush and fall asleep again. I engineered that very deliberately.

I liked the world of twine games a whole lot. Some were better than others — I have a lot of respect for Ke$ha but I don’t really care about her music enough to make that particular game work for me — and some were boring but very clever. Depression Quest really interested me in particular because it was actually the best representation of depression that I’ve ever come across. I don’t consider it a particularly big secret that I have depression (seriously, play my game) and the way DQ offered you the option of what you know you ought to do (things like Have an honest conversation or Relax and have a good time) but didn’t let you click it was so clever in mimicking the frustration and helplessness of this illness.

I also loved the absolute immersion of With Those We Love Alive. I think the bizarre prose it what drew me in, but I loved wandering around the world that the author had created. Sometimes the dead ends of twine games annoy me because I feel like they can be a bit superficial in their description; I don’t really have a strong enough grasp on the world to want to meander around in it. In WTWLA, I just enjoyed wandering through the strange, empty laneways of that kingdom. A lesson, then: don’t skimp on the description if you’re going to rely on the patience of your audience.