Friday, October 21, 2016

Queen's Menagerie (review)

"Queen's Menagerie" is an interactive story by Chandler Groover, written for the 2016 interactive fiction competition. This is the fourth of Chandler's entries I have played in the past two years, and I know he has written several more between seasons which I haven't played. They are all similarly grim, stylized, and poetic, but very different in form.

"Queen's Menagerie" lets you be the keeper of the queen's beastiary. Interaction is simple: you drag the name of some food item up to the beast you want to feed. Then descend to the next level of the exotic zoo. I can't say much more without spoiling the fun. The story has good replay value also, since there appear to be quite different responses, depending on which items you feed to which beast.

Illustrates that a game can have very simple interaction, but still be something worthy of a competition entry, and also unlike anything that could be read on paper.

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