Maybe you’re new to interactive fiction, and looking for a nice bite-sized starter game to try first to see if you like it. Maybe you prefer short, poignant narrative experiences to longer, more immersive ones.
Or, maybe you just don’t have a lot of free time. (I hear ya.)
Whatever the case, every one of these interactive short stories can be comfortably read in a single afternoon, and won’t waste a minute of your time.
Super Short Interactive Stories
The following “super short” interactive stories can typically be completed in 30 minutes or less. This is, of course, a rough estimate based on average read time, and only accounts for a single playthrough of each.
‘Queers in Love at the End of the World’ (Anna Anthropy, 2013)
By far the shortest game on this list, you can read it once in just 10 seconds. In fact, you have to. The summary is in the title; suffice it to say that the apocalypse is coming sooner, rather than later. It’s up to you to decide how to spend your precious last moments on earth―and whether they mean anything at all in the face of annihilation.
‘[text] A Summer Story’ (sakevisual, 2010)
A scary text-based game that uses background visuals and sounds to accentuate the atmosphere, this simple but effective horror short is told through phone text conversations between the player and a mysterious stranger. Multiple endings with different flavors make it well worth replaying, but a single read can be completed in around 15 minutes or so.
‘my father’s long long legs’ (Michael Lutz, 2013)
Another creepy text-based game that’s just around 20 minutes long, headphones are again strongly suggested—but no jump scares, I promise. This one is all about the slow build of dread as a young girl’s father becomes increasingly obsessive about digging a hole in the dirt floor basement of the family home. This story has only one ending, so one playthrough is all it takes to get the full story.
‘Photopia’ (Adam Cadre, 1998)
A renowned classic in the IF community, this interactive collection of short stories placed first in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and is considered by many to be one of the best of all time. Clocking in at just under half an hour, it is an easy (if somewhat unusual) game to navigate. Photopia manages to weave multiple stories together at once without being too confusing or convoluted, using color as a way to communicate when the story has changed.
Slightly Longer Interactive Short Stories
If you’re looking for something you can lose yourself in for a little longer (or if you’ve already finished playing all of the games above), these interactive short stories have just a bit more meat on their bones.
‘Florence’ (Mountains, 2018)
By far the most visual game on this list, Florence follows the eponymous player character, an aspiring artist, through different phases of her life and her relationship with Krish, a cellist. The story it tells—an inspirational story about finding yourself, masquerading as a romantic comedy—is linear and can be fully explored in a single playthrough (around 30-40 minutes).
‘Slouching Towards Bedlam’ (Ravipinto & Foster, 2003)
With a title taken from a Yeats poem and a steampunk premise that includes a secret society, a virus that spreads through speech, and time manipulation, it’s hard to imagine how Slouching Towards Bedlam wouldn’t be worthy of the mere two or so hours a single read typically takes. Of course, with five completely different endings, you may have to block off a whole day if you want to see how every version of the story plays out.
‘chiaroscuro’ (Kim Berkley, 2022)
My own upcoming interactive short story is about the same length (roughly two hours or less to read once), with the same number of distinct endings to achieve. The premise, however, couldn’t be more different. In chiaroscuro, a young artist named Perce travels to Rome to find her muse. Instead, she meets two strange creatures, one dark and one light. Which of these she’ll spend her time with is up to you to determine—as is the course of Perce’s future.
Not Every Game (or Story) Has to Be Epic to be Good
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Skyrim or Witcher 3 type of immersive experience―the kind you can get lost in for months on end.
But not every game has to be huge. Not every fantasy has to be epic. And not every story has to be a Stephen King length novel to be meaningful or memorable.
Sometimes, shorter is better. And these interactive short stories offer the best of both: brief reads whose stories stay with us long after we reach the end.
chiaroscuro is an interactive short story developed in Twine and coming soon to a browser near you. Explore Rome and search for inspiration, and perhaps make a few unusual friends along the way. chiaroscuro will be released in January 2022 and will be 100% free to play.
