That being said, the tale of this little girl that strives to make her life worthwhile is so endearing, I’m recommending it to my no-gamer friends.

This is great. Maybe I’m just unaware of some prior art here, but I’m struck by how the inclusion of just a bit of game system (stat points, time of year, year-end goal) goes a long way toward mitigating the feeling of undirected haphazardness that plagued most of the ‘hypertext fiction’ from the 90s (with a few exceptions, most notably [if I'm remembering correctly] Shelley Jackson’s ‘Patchwork Girl’ and another whose name I can’t recall that was brilliant but, it turns out in the end [and I remember thinking this correlation was likely no accident] completely linear). The game systems restore a sense of authorial control, I think, that I’m mildly convinced (perhaps controversially?) is crucial in making reading a story feel worthwhile.

(I didn’t realize until the end that the formatting/infrastructure is a function of the Varytale platform and not specifically created just for this piece?)

The one thing I wasn’t sure how to handle was the large amount of repetition, especially in the spelling lessons / word lists. Some repeated events make sense, mirroring the cyclical life of a family (game night, time for church, etc.) and it’s a plus, I think, that the repetition there lets you see other sub-branches of those event types, but the lack of new words to learn made each click on, say, ‘study greek roots’ feel like a wasted opportunity, both from a player perspective [was this a wasted turn? I want to win!] and from a storytelling/reader perspective [there could have been a nice new paragraph to read here!].

That said, perhaps the repetition also helps alleviate some of the earlier hypertext works’ groundlessness. Here, by the end, you feel like you’ve almost saturated the entire field of storytelling options, and the repetition lets you know that you’re not capriciously missing out.

But perhaps it’s telling (and undercuts my initial argument) that my favorite part has almost nothing to do with the game system. The second trip to the hair salon was just such a nice bit of storytelling, teasing out a small bit of social misunderstanding into something that feels more momentous precisely because we’ve already spent a bunch of time with the main character and have already internalized her (and her mother’s) limited perspective.