This game is set in the universe of Narbonic, an old gag-a-day webcomic by Shaenon Garrity […]
For a brief time in my life, for no tangible reason, I had a strong crush on it, and it was important to me. It is in the interest of lackadaisically memorialising the brief time I had with [this] comic that I created this little text game. – [Author’s description]
Thanx Noyb.
This is excellent. It’s surprisingly satisfying to see a Twine game hew so closely to a standard set of text parser verbs, like a streamlined text adventure game with all the fumbling through wide open decision-space stripped away. There are also a ton of clever little touches, not the smallest of which is asking the player up front whether or not they’re a smoker and then carrying that decision forward through the entire text.
Without spoiling it completely, the smartest thing it does is how by the halfway point it sets up a structure in which there’s urgency from moment to moment (almost like a timer) and yet nonetheless complete accommodation for the player to make mistakes and/or take her time, with neither of those two aspects nullifying or contradicting the other. That’s really smart.