We, The Watched - Chapter One - a Twine text adventure

[WatchAdam]

Hi all, @ExilianOfficial on Twitter encouraged me to share my Twine game, so here goes!

This short text adventure is based on my novel We, The Watched. The novel is set in a dystopian nation in which the government keeps a Watched list of its own citizens. Citizens must be careful about what they say because there are surveillance cameras everywhere. Meanwhile, the Church has become as powerful as the State, and people who resist are called Heretics and face execution. The books follow a young man called Seven who wakes with no memory in this surveillance society. His amnesia gives him a blank-slate perspective that helps him see through the propaganda, and he soon gets involved with a group of rebels called The Underground.

The new text adventure follows Chapter One of We, The Watched, in which Seven wakes up in the middle of a forest with no idea of where he is or how he got there.

All right, enough introduction! You can play at http://goo.gl/6sv9rJ

[Son of the King]

I escaped the forest! This was a nice little text adventure, and it made me want to read your book .

[WatchAdam]

Hey, thanks! That's exactly the response I was looking for, haha. When you do check out the book, please let me know what you think!

[Jubal]

I like the principle of looking at surveillance from an amnesiac's perspective - it's definitely a major political issue for me, and that's an interesting twist on looking at it.

The game I thought generally worked well, though there were perhaps a few too many places where picking one option just gave you a readout and then presented you with the other option - doing that can make the player feel a bit "railroaded" (which makes sense from the perspective of following a writer's plot, but perhaps less from a game player's perspective). I did enjoy it though, was an interesting playthrough!

[WatchAdam]

I like the principle of looking at surveillance from an amnesiac's perspective - it's definitely a major political issue for me, and that's an interesting twist on looking at it.

The game I thought generally worked well, though there were perhaps a few too many places where picking one option just gave you a readout and then presented you with the other option - doing that can make the player feel a bit "railroaded" (which makes sense from the perspective of following a writer's plot, but perhaps less from a game player's perspective). I did enjoy it though, was an interesting playthrough!

Thanks. Yeah -- with this one it's basically impossible to lose. You either get more or less details about the world depending on what you choose. The reason is I want to get people to the end with this one. Also, this is my first Twine so I kept things simple. For my next Twine project I think I'll try to have multiple paths and endings.

[Jubal]

Yeah... I've taken a look at twine but never really tried using it. I quite like building things with a little more "gameplay" and interactivity, I guess, so I write text-based games like LIFE (http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4181) from scratch in Python mostly.