The Last Night of Alexisgrad by Milo van Mesdag (IFDB) was an entry in IFComp 2021. It's a two-player Twine game. 10 November 2021 Yotam and I play through it a couple of times together while we voice call over Discord. We see a lot that could be improved, but we have some fun with it and feel inspired to try building something similar. I end up rating it 7 out of 10:
The author published a postmortem after the comp.
I wrote this review on intfiction.org:
I’ve never heard of a two player Twine game before! I set up a voice chat with a buddy from school and we had a good time with this. It helped that the instructions were simple: Same number of clicks per player, share codes when you get them.
The first thing that surprised me about Alexisgrad was how long the passages are. It made more sense one we realized it was designed with exactly one lockstep choice per page. In real-time this meant a bit of silent reading time on the phone between interactions, which was a tiny bit awkward but we were game for it.
Near the beginning it doesn’t seem like your choices are affecting the other player much. In the middle there’s a choice of setting for the third act, and the game ends with a confrontation between the players, which in our experiences could take the forms of a negotiation or an execution. The pace picks up for this third act, and we found the code-exchange system surprisingly fluid.
The game takes place in a fictional country with its own politics, culture and history, and the player characters are distinctive while leaving room for roleplay. World building is meted out over the arc of the story and across different possible branches too - I was surprised at the new things we learned about the setting on our second go. It also revealed some clever railroading - the first act seems to always bottleneck into the same scenes, and I suspect much of the third act is the same regardless of setting but the setting-specific flavor text is nicely woven in so it doesn’t feel generic.
The prose is heavy with description, and a few phrases were laugh out loud clunky, but it serves the game well enough. There are some uninformed choices: For example, the Dictator’s choice of a hiding place, and the General’s choice of “who to send in” are both consequential, but the player doesn’t have enough information to differentiate the options. It would be nice to have a hint about why the PC might pick each option. Finally, I think this is too grim for some tastes. I saw the content warning, but the suicide in the first scene and the particularly cold murder of one player by the other on some paths were borderline for me.
This was definitely fun with the right player 2 (although I’ll admit making fun of it together was part of the fun) and it left me feeling inspired to try something similar. What a cool idea. Thanks Milo!