Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

As you step outside, the world shifts from day to night. Looking behind you, the tent disappears, slowly fading into the background, until it disappears. You pat your pocket and realize you have a knife in there. You take it out of its sheath, and accidentally knicking your finger on it. You promise yourself that you won’t do that again.

I am a fan of “get out of a mysterious puzzle” movies like Cube (1997) and Exam (2009) so I’m in the target market for S. Elize Morgan’s Unform. In this case you have amnesia and are facing “Judgement” from a series of tests.

However, some issues arise:

• The game very much wants to have puzzles, but using only CYOA format without an inventory forces them to be very simplistic. At one point, for instance, you have a choice of number sequences, but it’s extremely easy to click each possibility and bypass thinking altogether.
• There’s a well-realized background but it gets unloaded at the very end of the story in a massive text-dump and it never gets used for anything interesting in the actual interactive part of the story.
• The tests never mesh with the final resolution. I have no idea how the “reform” that allegedly happens somehow would come from the tests. If the tests had been moral tests rather than vague puzzles the plot would have made more sense.

Blades of grass being formed by nanites.