Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister captures a charming, affecting story inside the limitations of a thoughts map program.
I wasn’t positive precisely what I used to be anticipating once I first clicked via Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister‘s ‘Restore Investigation’ button, however I wasn’t anticipating to be anyplace close to as drawn in and shaken by the story.
This sport is an interactive fiction title created in a free, kanban-style productiveness software, domino2, as a part of the latest anti-productivity jam. The jam, if you happen to haven’t already surmised, is themed across the idea of taking a software designed particularly for productiveness and ‘work-related’ use and constructing out an expertise inside it.
As you may in all probability think about, that might be fairly robust (regardless of fashionable city tales of Doom operating on every thing, and that model of Excel having Microsoft Flight Simulator constructed into it). The workaround, within the case of Lithobreakers’ creation, was to take a mind-map program (a software for brainstorming concepts and getting them on paper to arrange them or broaden them) and stretch out a story — an investigation — throughout the display screen.
I’m avoiding spoilers right here as a result of I genuinely consider that it is best to go and play it. However I’ll say that it’s not simply the intelligent use of the software that makes this stand out; it’s the outstanding writing. Throughout it’s half-a-dozen characters, the author managed to create a bunch of personalities that stand aside from one another from their first sentences or mentions. These characters are well-written and plausible from the get-go, they usually’re launched via logical sequences of occasions. I like that completely different observe backgrounds are used for various interactions and notes — together with notes from the “board creator’s good friend” — and that there’s even a bit of legend and information in there, all written completely in character.
Being an expansive, mind-map software it’s, as you’d in all probability anticipate it to be, a bit difficult to seek out your means via at occasions. Nevertheless, even if you happen to do stumble via issues out of order it’s all written in a means that compels you to seek out the inquiries to the solutions you’ve simply learn. It didn’t take me lengthy to get via the entire thing, however I used to be left with questions on the finish that I do know won’t ever be answered – and I do know that I’ll be speaking about, and fascinated by, my time with the sport for a very long time.
Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister is playable free of charge on itch.io.
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