Recordkeeping: Penrose COMPLETE
Jul. 19th, 2021 05:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlToday I woke up thinking, for no reason I could put together, about A Dark Room. If you're unfamiliar, it's an idle-game sort of thing, click some buttons and some things happen, keep the numbers going up, etc.
So I decided to prod that. About three minutes into it, a pop-up comes up letting me know it has sound now. Nah. Then another pop-up about ... some other thing? I didn't get it, and it sounded like an enhanced game mode. So I clicked it out of curiosity and it went to Penrose.
Namely it went to the web demo of Penrose. I didn't find out until later, irritatingly, that the web version is incomplete and you need to drop $1 on Android or iOS to play the full thing. Which I did. But first I played the web version.
It's a hyperlink story. You make choices and things change. Perspectives change. Minor choices make major changes, although you only ever really have minor choices that make major changes. You never really get to change much of insignificance, which is a shame but understandable.
So you look at the story and you change it, and you read it again, and you change characters and read it again, and then you change something else and wait shit how did it get like that, and you scroll back and read from the beginning and well THAT'S different, so you follow another trail and another and well SHIT and another and...
...eventually, abruptly, it ends. In a way that made me "well SHIT" even harder. And then think about it.
Penrose is... a strange, strange little story. I don't regret playing through it.
It does make me wonder why I woke up thinking of "A Dark Room", though.
So I decided to prod that. About three minutes into it, a pop-up comes up letting me know it has sound now. Nah. Then another pop-up about ... some other thing? I didn't get it, and it sounded like an enhanced game mode. So I clicked it out of curiosity and it went to Penrose.
Namely it went to the web demo of Penrose. I didn't find out until later, irritatingly, that the web version is incomplete and you need to drop $1 on Android or iOS to play the full thing. Which I did. But first I played the web version.
It's a hyperlink story. You make choices and things change. Perspectives change. Minor choices make major changes, although you only ever really have minor choices that make major changes. You never really get to change much of insignificance, which is a shame but understandable.
So you look at the story and you change it, and you read it again, and you change characters and read it again, and then you change something else and wait shit how did it get like that, and you scroll back and read from the beginning and well THAT'S different, so you follow another trail and another and well SHIT and another and...
...eventually, abruptly, it ends. In a way that made me "well SHIT" even harder. And then think about it.
Penrose is... a strange, strange little story. I don't regret playing through it.
It does make me wonder why I woke up thinking of "A Dark Room", though.
