A Crumpled Piece of Paper by DrOctothorpe
Twine/Harlowe - Neo-Twiny Jam Play the Game Read other reviews
A Crumpled Piece of Paper is an interactive epistolary game, where you find a balled up piece of paper on the pavement. Curious about its content, you open it. It's a letter written to an ex. Reminiscing on the past. Talking about the present. But it's also a lot more.
The game calls itself flash fiction, using cycling interactive elements to display different sides of the story. It starts off pretty normal and mundane, exploring the messy feelings of break ups. Soon, though, as you interact with the sentences, so does the tone. It's a bit bizarre, quite sad, then turns to chilling, to down right horror-y!
You'd think the shift of tone would be bizarre, but it's incredibly well done here. Fed drip by drip, you don't realise until it's too late what has happened here. There's a bit of a back and forth with a few sections at the end, almost re-writing what was there before.
But I think the most interesting thing about the interactivity here, is the tiny "combination puzzles". At a couple key points, you have multiple active cycling elements, blocking the rest of the story until you match the correct words. In the context of when the letter was written in-game, it really puts emphasis on how the choice of words are important, how they all have different meanings and weights, how appropriate they are in specific situations.
This was really really good!
