Aisle: Twenty Years Later
April 9th, 2019 by Anya Johanna DeNiroAisle 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 […]
[More]Failing Forward
April 1st, 2019 by Bruno DiasSekiro: 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 Natalia TheodoridouElizabeth 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 […]
[More]April 2019 table of contents
April 1st, 2019 by Stewart C BakerEncounters 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, 2019Story by Holly Heisey
Art by Holly Heisey
I live, therefore I script.

Hounds & Heroes: Control, Closure, and Exploration in Games
April 1st, 2019 by Sharang BiswasGames 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
April 1st, 2019Story by Elizabeth Smyth
A true story about something you saw in the dark.
Not what you were looking for?
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