Your eyes are black and lifeless and round, sunken into your pale, ovoid face, their movement imperceptible to anyone but you.
Nessa Cannon
Summary: This game has an amazing narrative and storyline, it’s coherent with all branches and seems to dig deeply into what one expects of a gruesome beast or a lonely human. With many possible endings and possible rewinds, I think this game is surely worth one’s time.
Introduction to the game
A branching choose-your-own-adventure horror game about transformation and perspective. This is the developers their first twine game, made for a narrative design class and built upon. The game features the infamous click and progress way of gameplay signifying most games build with twine. The game doesn’t seem to feature audio, nor does it advertise it, so I decided to play some tunes in the background, I think suits the game, check it out! The font used is one of my favorites, it’s called ‘Constantia’. Little heads up, there is no ‘main menu’, you run the game, you start the game. So without wasting more words and your valuable time drooling on fonts and whatnot, let’s dive into the game.
My opinion
It is dark when we arrive, sadly the real world around me isn’t, since the days are getting longer and the nights are getting shorter. Oh my, our first option is one of immediate divergence, picking the other would mean killing a complete branch. This is good since it does allow replayability! For now, I assume what the protagonist would’ve thought since they didn’t seem to recognize the house (knowing the crow did perhaps recognize us). We enter the house and I am honestly afraid to choose, not knowing whether there is a way to return to the other options, between seeing different parts of the house. Interestingly enough we smell something after wanting to go upstairs. Some words are crossed and I doubt a fact about our protagonist, well, it was never stated as a fact so I can’t doubt anything, but we assume they are human… right…?
I have a weird feeling that our protagonist might be of another descendant than humans. This feeling is getting stronger as more and more words get crossed out, and I feel more and more at unease. This hunch was correct, for we are allowed to stare at ourselves in a mirror, I love the fact we are playing the normally ‘antagonist’ of other horror games. It’s something refreshing, it’s good. Knowing this we are surely allowed to hunt, aren’t we? I don’t think a lonely human in an abandoned house is much of a fight for us, the dreadful beast. The beast we are might actually be a Wendigo since we seem to carry antlers and voids as eyes.
Whoever the lonely human is or was, they screamed at us, and we are in full pursuit. After making a hero landing by jumping over a railing to shortcut to our ‘victim’, we are suddenly contemplating something. Is this a plot twist coming up…? We are hit we an amazing flashback, adding much depth to the story, it’s that of the reason why the crow might have recognized us, or rather, our soul. What I even love more is the fact the protagonist has a narrator telling us how we still subtly remember details, making it feel like we freshly transformed. Shortly after, the smell is getting the better of us and we quickly advance to the ending.
This game has an amazing narrative and storyline, it’s coherent with all branches and seems to dig deeply into what one expects of a gruesome beast or a lonely human. It’s rewarding to play all branches and uncover the truth of this short but stunning horror game. With a short playthrough time and making every word count, it’s super interesting to delve into the reason why we are either a monstrosity prone to kill humans or why we are there in the first place. With many possible endings and possible rewinds, I think this game is surely worth one’s time.