Yes, my mother is... (review)

"Yes, my mother is..." is a CYOA type game written by Skarn for the 2016 interactive fiction competition.

The PC is a therapist, who dispenses advice to a series of clients at her office. This near future fiction imagines a world in which the PC's mother has established an autonomous colony for some group of people who wear colorful masks and identify as "N/A". Yes, another Twine entry about identity labels.

I felt motivated to discover the hidden backstory of the N/A movement, but I think the pacing is off. There is a lot of text to wade through during therapy sessions, and only infrequent clues about what the titular "mother" is up to. The reader probably won't feel satisfied that they understand the backstory until they have played to more than one ending. During my second game I found myself skimming down the text as fast as I could, trying to find the “big reveal”. But even then, I wasn't satisfied that I really understood what was going on.

Some of the therapy options are a little non-conventional, but best of these is the opportunity to cold-cock a threatening skinhead and send him out of the therapy office in a bag.