Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

By litrouke. Played on desktop to completion.

10pm involves a short conversation between you, a 12 year old boy named Bird, and their “parental figure” named Ty.

Bird ostensibly does not speak. You communicate using icons.

The icons are metaphors for Bird “signing”. This slight remove from normal conversation is the most compelling part of this work. I felt the tingle of being inside someone else’s head. Multiple signs have particular meaning, so not only do you need to consider a response, but how to say it. While the prose of Ty’s responses isn’t impressive in any way, it does read like natural dialogue. (All apostrophes are omitted but that’s clearly a style choice; I admit one I never got used to.)

One extra element makes 10pm worth replay: the background and world setting are slowly hinted at as being abnormal. I’m going to avoid spoilers here, but deciphering how Bird got where he is and what he has to go through took me a couple tries (not onerous; it’s a short work, about 10 minutes).