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Switcheroo

on ifcomp-2015
Interactive fiction competition 2015 is over. There were 53 games and you can see their results here. But the games are still worth discussing so let's do it.

This article is spoiler-free.

Author: The Marino Family. Play online

One day, a boy woke up as a girl. That’s the premise. How did she learn that? Oh, she just tried to pee. And you read and click and read more about peeing. Oh, and by the way he was cured of a serious disability but GENDER is more important than an ability to jump, right? So naturally he doesn’t want a healthy body, he wants his penis back. Then lots of stereotypes happen (you know, pink colour? and dolls? girls like that, don’t they?).

I think this one needs to straighten its priorities. Is it a kids tale? It’s published in a kid series but “aimed at a slightly older demographic than the others”. How old is the protagonist and (sorry that can’t be ignored) what’s a sex life for him? What’s the big deal about being a girl that he immediately wants back? Is it just because he doesn’t like pink?

To be honest, he didn’t feel any different, physically, but his emotions were spinning like a kaleidoscope. <…> Though he had no sisters, he had friends who were girls, and they were perfectly normal, as girls go. But they clearly were different, and that was as it should be.

Or I think it’s because the narrator wants her to switch back. The narrator’s “got to get used to that”. I can see the narrator’s character but I can’t understand the heroine. How old was/is she? There are Carlos Santana and Harry Potter references. Do you know that people who read the fifth HP book in 2003 are adults now?

I feel like I read a lonely man’s fetish fantasy. And he just put an undescribed kid in because the story needed a hero. Ugh.

The game looks nice. It uses Undum but the author removed the save/erase save button (why?) and put in a weird autosave system. It asks for your name and then that name is used only for these autosaves. It looks nice and the illustrations are good (though I’d choose something else for the cover, but — again, I’m questioning priorities). It tracks a lot of stats that make no difference as fas as I noticed and tracks your… i don’t know, femininity? as literary characters (because Little Prince is obviously more feminine than Dorothy…what?). It has a single puzzle where you match a girl outfit.

Okay, that was not my kind of fantasy. Moving on.