Sketchnotes & Mindmap:
Game Play:
I played Animalia, a choice-based interactive fiction game created by Ian Michael Waddell and released in 2018. Made with Twine, it runs in a web browser and is available at https://imw.itch.io/animalia. Its target audience is people who enjoy dark humor and choice-based stories. The story begins after a forest community sacrifices a nine-year-old boy named Charlie Stewart. To prevent humans from investigating his disappearance, four animals operate a lifelike replica of Charlie and attempt to impersonate him. I played the game three times, choosing different animals and actions during each attempt. All three attempts ended in failure: once, a basketball hit the replica’s head and exposed the animals to Charlie’s father; the other two attempts ended when the disguise was discovered during dinner.
The game’s strongest narrative strategy is enacted narrative, because players participate in the animals’ attempts to maintain their disguise. The introduction establishes the sacrifice, the threat of human investigation, and the plan to replace Charlie. It also familiarizes players to the main interaction: clicking highlighted words to reveal more text or advance the story. This creates a controlled sequence through which the author establishes the situation before allowing more substantial decisions. Players then select one animal for each of four roles: head, torso, arms, and legs, with three candidates available for each role. Players enact the impersonation through decisions on responding to human situations.
Although choices produce different sequences of events, the available actions and resulting passages remain written by the author. I sometimes disliked every available option because they all seemed likely to cause problems – but maybe the embarrassment is what the author wanted to create. Although these restrictions help maintain the author’s storyline, they limit me on expressing what I actually wanted the characters to behave. Repeatedly clicking highlighted words to reveal predetermined exposition feels frustrating and boring. These clicks do not lead to meaningful decisions and interrupted my reading, actually decreasing immersion.
Evocative narrative appears a little through the game’s use of familiar human society and talking woodland animals. Players recognize human routines that the animals misunderstand, creating a gap between the player’s knowledge and the squad’s perspective and thus leads to humor. Talking animals also evoke children’s stories and expectations of innocence, making the sacrifice more disturbing. The combination produces dark, absurd comedy.
These strategies contribute to the aesthetics of Fantasy and Narrative. The fantasy comes from inhabiting an impossible situation: several animals jointly operating a human replica. The narrative unfolds through their attempts to navigate Charlie’s daily life, while branching consequences create curiosity about what might happen next. The enacting narrative of the story conveys the background setting and the plots the author prepared, but also to the extent that I feel I couldn’t really make a choice in the game. For me, there was less amusement in the story but more discomfort and frustration.
The game genre is Choose Your Own Adventure with choice-based hypertext fiction. The important affordance is that the author controls the available language and actions. Meanwhile, choices can alter relationships and later scenes. There is also state of the main character (e.g. clothing is shabby) and other human (e.g. Mom is furious). There are some branches and choices that attempt to provide the player a sense of agency. However, the same format restricts players to the actions offered, which can weaken their sense of agency when none matches their intentions.
I particularly liked the creative use of texts. In the line describing Charlie crashing repeatedly “Charlie crashes again. And again. Aaaaaand again.”, each of the ‘again’ is a single click and another ‘again’ would appear. The repetition of clicks imitates the repeated crashing. Unlike the introductory exposition, the clicking here contributes directly to rhythm and meaning. I also like that the protagonist is a group instead of one character. This allows more diverse personalities instead of one stereotype and players thus don’t project themselves onto one but the more relatable ‘part’ for each event. It also allows for Internal communication and multiple perspectives.
Other features were less successful for me. The skip option was unclear: I expected it to skip the current passage, but it moved directly to character selection and skipped the background sequence. A more descriptive label would have helped. I also could not identify a consistent meaning behind the changing background colors. I initially expected them to indicate locations or communication modes, but their purpose remained unclear during my playthroughs. Because I was already processing unfamiliar vocabulary and multiple speakers, this added to the information I had to interpret. Such overload of information is unnecessary and disrupts game play. I also do not like the list of achievements shown among all possibilities after the game ends. Each round players tend to only achieve a few, and there are just too many empty spaces. They felt more like a failure than encouragement to replay. Without understanding how to reach them, I felt confused and disappointed. In my own narratives, I would want replay prompts to encourage curiosity without making an unsuccessful attempt feel inadequate.
The background colors seem very random.
I interpreted the game as inviting empathy toward vulnerable beings, animals or kids; at the same time, the game expose contradictions in how communities justify suffering. The classroom mouse-feeding scene disturbed me most. The animals regard feeding a mouse to a snake as horrifying and become emotionally invested in saving it. Yet it’s very sarcastic that their own community sacrifice a human child, and the animal who questions the ritual is executed. Their concern for one victim sits uneasily beside their acceptance of another victim’s death. They were trying to replace Charlie, but a lost child is forever lost. I feel disgusted by words to justify/reframe behaviors and substituting in different perspectives. The game mainly invoke discomfort for me and question morality – whether the animal consider the Offering as what the ‘ forest God want’ or teacher says feeding is ‘being responsible to a pet’.
For me, the game was more successful at provoking moral reflection than at producing dark humor. As a non-native English speaker, I found some vocabulary and jokes difficult to understand. My dominant response was discomfort, especially because the replica cannot undo the loss of the real Charlie. It made me question whose suffering receives sympathy and whether persuasive language can make cruelty appear acceptable.
