Aisle: Twenty Years Later

April 9th, 2019 by

Aisle by Sam Barlow is one of the foundations of post-Infocom interactive fiction. This isn’t just from the impact on other one-move games, such as Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle (played for laughs), or Rematch (played for puzzles), or even more recent games like Midnight. Swordfight. that take the one-move conceit and expand […]

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Failing Forward

April 1st, 2019 by

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is out at last and so I’m thinking again about the perennial theme of FromSoftware’s loosely-connected Souls series: Failure. Failure is part of life, and it’s an ingrained feature of storytelling. Writing-101-type story structures often incorporate some aspect of failure: heroes make mistakes or are set back by their inability to […]

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Author Interview: Elizabeth Smyth

April 1st, 2019 by

Elizabeth Smyth is a writer, game developer and villain enthusiast, currently working for Fusebox Games in London. She has been making weird and/or dark IF since 2013. Read some more of it at elizabethsmyth.com or find her tweeting about slime at untiltheygo. Elizabeth is the author of our April story, “The Invader.” This interview was […]

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April 2019 table of contents

April 1st, 2019 by

Encounters between the everyday and the unknown are a big part of what makes speculative fiction (and, I would argue, art in general) so effective at pulling us out of ourselves and into the mind of someone else. It’s this tension that gives Poe his eerie cerebral terror and LeGuin’s worlds their endless beauty—and their […]

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Scripting Diplomacy

April 1st, 2019
Story by Holly Heisey
Art by Holly Heisey

I live, therefore I script.

Hounds & Heroes: Control, Closure, and Exploration in Games

April 1st, 2019 by

Games fetishize heroes. Traditionally, games devote their attention to the Hero and the details of their epic quest. We players, bloodhounds slavering for plot, fixate on this Hero. We tear into them, inhabit them, and through their agency, we exert change on an authored world. Killing is often involved. (The bloodhound metaphor still holds.) * […]

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The Invader by Elizabeth Smyth

The Invader

April 1st, 2019
Story by Elizabeth Smyth

A true story about something you saw in the dark.



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