You are SpamZapper 3.1 is a new Twine game I worked on from late April until this week. Play as a spam-blocking mail application plugin in 2000, and slowly uncover secrets about your user’s friends while having a massive mental health crisis. There are some puzzles later on, but I designed them to be as trivial and brute-forceable as possible for narrative reasons.
Painfully obvious inspirations were 3 in Three, Digital: A Love Story and Secret Little Haven. However, unlike the latter two, I tried to write this in a very “anti-nostalgic” style, where I reference pop culture and “retro” aesthetics as little as possible. It’s not a fond memory, it’s just the past.
I did this mainly as an experiment in seeing once and for all whether I really did enjoy fiction writing or not, after a few decades of considering myself a “creative person”. I’m afraid to report my results from this were “it’s complicated”. I do like this story, but it’s not something I’d consider a window into my soul, so to speak.
This reads as an endorsement to me, the idea that every iota of artistic output has to be powered by the deepest recesses of the artist’s personality is destructive to the long hard work of creation imo
I played/read through this. I’m not familiar with any of its stated influences, but I liked where the story ended up going. Playing with the idea of personal identity is something I always like to see.
I appreciated the puzzles being “brute-forceable” because (maybe due to my lack of experience with interactive fiction) I found it slightly difficult to shift from consuming the narrative to remembering things/figuring things out. Even though the answers were simple and made sense. Maybe my mind was just in reading-a-story mode.
amused that ZAP/APPROVE probably doesn’t branch the narrative at all?
couldn’t gauge how intentional it was but the flash forwards do a good job of selling the catharist theming. maybe that’s unsurprising since christianity has always wanted an apocalypse. you sort of anticipate the scientist getting raptured into noospace via zap but it’s probably for the best for the narrative that there’s nothing so pat
i know chimes is not intended to be plural rep but they did remind me of plural people i’ve known and it was sweet to see
late but played this apropos nothing yesterday and had a really good time with it! especially the characterisation of the email writers. i am starting a petition to bring back the little mouse cowboys.
the mystical turn with the nous wasn’t to my taste at first but it won me over with the weird escalation into gnosticism, complete with the idea that the “god” of the private religious college is the demiurge being opposed by anonymous computer spam filter angels, which is both a funny idea and also feels perfectly appropriate to the era of like 2000s sprite comics coming up with their own forms of pulp tech gnosticism based on reused pieces of old final fantasy games