IFComp 2014: Following Me   Leave a comment

Tia Orisney’s Following Me is of a style I thought I might be seeing more of: the classic Choose Your Own Adventure book. (Caveat: As fas I know none of the originals involved fleeing from serial killers.)

I should probably explain: our mom took her intuition to a higher level by believing that a finding a black ribbon on the ground meant that someone was going to die. The “theory” behind that had something to do with how, when her father had died, she’d worn a black ribbon around her arm for a year. This was too far into the world of hoodoo nonsense for me, but for a moment when I’d seen that glove I’d been frozen by panic. Aria must have thought the same thing, she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere near it.

I usually avoid the term CYOA for choice-based works because the original book series had a distinctive style of a.) long textual segments, followed by choices of between either 2 or 3 things and b.) a general inability to decide which of the choices is the better one.

b.) is of course a touch negative, although as far as I can tell from this game it isn’t possible to “lose”. No matter what choices there are, Sections 1, 2, etc. of the story all start in the same place. I caught on to the structure early on which undercut some of the tension.

Appreciated: the main characters had the right amount of panic and grit (not too heroic, not too foolish) and the serial killers seemed more like characters than the usual super-capable villains. They were capable of making mistakes; the only reason they had the upper hand on the main characters is circumstance.

Black ribbon.

Black ribbon.

Posted October 25, 2014 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction

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