I played Animalia by Ian Michael Waddell on Twine. In this game, you play as a team of four forest creatures disguised as a human boy (Charlie) in human society. You are trying to keep the rest of your animal society (the Taiga Federation) safe from humans by going undercover and finding out what they are up to. I believe the primary audience for this game is teens and up, as well as those with a slightly dark sense of humor. I played the game for 1 hour.
This game uses enacted and embedded narrative strategies. Demonstrative of Henry Jenkins’ definition of an “enacted narrative” strategy, Animalia presents the players with both broad-level goals and localized incidents, where player’s choices in-world influence other characters’ responses or reactions. This game is also unique in that the player enacts the story through four different characters, who sometimes interact with each other or interact together with other human characters as they pretend to be Charlie. These in-game decisions also shape the world around the characters, usually by putting the Taiga Federation at more or less risk from humans. For example, when playing with a team that includes Chunks the Magpie, there is a scene where the player must solo act as Chunks as they try to stop Charlie’s mom from going far into the forest (where the Taiga Federation lives). Depending on your choices as Chunks, you finish the solo mission in time to return to other animals pretending to be Charlie and keep up the facade in front of Charlie’s dad (the “Charlie” replica requires all four animals to operate).
To a lesser extent, Animalia also uses what Jenkins would define as an “embedded narrative” strategy, meaning that through the player’s choices of interactions with the environment or other characters around them, the player learns more information about how humans think about and/or plan to interact with the forest where the Taiga Federation lives. For example, when the four disguised animals take the bus to school and the player chooses to sit next to Hanae, you learn through dialogue that she and Charlie have been preparing a presentation about the Taiga biome, and the humans are very interested in this region (to the dismay of the animals).
The “Choose Your Own Adventure” sub-genre of this game allows the player some agency (especially during your first run-through) over how the story will unfold, while still moving the game along. I noticed that when I replayed this game and picked different animals to be on my team of four, new scenes would appear while others from previous playthroughs didn’t. There were multiple plotlines that, if you chose the wrong answer, had a dead-end, with the game essentially ending. These dead-ends helped inform the player’s knowledge of what to do on the next playthrough, advancing further along the narrative. At the same time, though, it seemed all choices led to the same ending, where the player meets the Forest God (i.e., the school mascot) and both humans and animals go out to the forest and celebrate together. With the Choose Your Own Adventure format, the player’s choices might mean that they end up at this ending, having skipped other scenes with choices that served as shortcuts.
The biggest inspiration for me from this game was how Waddell wrote their narrative from the perspective of the four animals you play as (and on Twine, the platform I plan to use). Because these animals are the player’s avatars, the style and humor of narration very strongly reinforced my perspective as being undercover in a society or culture that my avatars are unfamiliar with but that I, the human player, am. For example, during a breakfast scene, while Charlie’s mom describes the flavor of jam as “raspberry,” the animals internally all make fun of her because they know that jam is obviously made from “gorblesnucks.” I loved how the introduction brought me immediately into the world of the Taiga Federation, where I learned what their concerns were about discovery from the humans and where the game sets up its premise of needing a team of animals to operate the Charlie replica. I think this game showed me how I could make an animal such a strong main character who was easy to empathize with, as each of the animal characters all had distinct personalities and dynamics with one another. I also liked how Waddell used a combination of 1.) embedding the clickable word/choice within a piece of text to more narrowly control the narration flow while breaking up the story into chunks to keep the player’s attention, and 2.) offering a menu of choices (a combination of embedded and enacted narrative strategies). For example, in this one scene where you plot the rescue of a mouse from being food for the classroom pet snake, there are multiple options that embedded in the text that you can click on to gather more information, as well as a menu of options at the bottom that you pre-select. The scene then runs itself, with the player’s choices locked in and the player having to watch the consequences play out.
At times, it did feel like the text was too long and my eyes would start to skim or glaze over, so I think breaking up those long stretches of text even more would be useful. After an hour of playing, the game did start to feel a little repetitive as I tried to explore new routes because I needed to complete a specific sequence of events that I already knew to get to those new scenes. At first, I felt motivated to try out new routes, but by the end, I felt a little fatigued and maybe even frustrated to see how many game moments I missed (which you can view at the end of a playthrough). In my game, I think I might try to structure my narrative in bunches of multiple pathways that all lead to the same progression of main steps towards an end goal.
I believe this game attempted to draw empathy towards the animals through humor, the avatar perspective of the animals, and the presentation of the goal as a team mission. I started to really care about the animals as characters at risk of losing their home, especially as I watched their dynamics unfold with one another due to their strong personalities. I felt a lot of delight, especially upon the first playthrough with the initial set-up and buy-in of the undercover mission. I also felt loss or disappointment when I didn’t successfully achieve mini-missions that were important to some of the characters. For example, on my first playthrough, I did not successfully save the mouse from being fed to the classroom pet snake, and my mouse avatar was extremely horrified.
However, I do think the final ending of the game somewhat cheated the empathy the game had been building up. With an ending that had humans and animals harmoniously worshipping the Forest God together in the woods, I felt like I had missed a few key scenes that explained this sudden goodwill, after a whole mission spent undercover to try to stop human encroachment on the animals’ habitat.
