IF Comp Review: Crossroads

[healyg]

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Cat Manning's Crossroads.

Crossroads is a short, heavily branching urban horror story about an encounter with a menacing witch. They say it's death to meet with her, but I didn't encounter any death endings per se across the several times I've played through it. What you're looking for with her changes depending on your choices in the story, but most of them seem to deal with seeking forgiveness or catharsis or something along those lines. The writing was good at building up a menacing atmosphere, and there are a couple interesting tricks with the interface in several episodes.

Crossroads is, I think, a game that improves considerably upon replay, because a lot of the different storylines inform each other, building up a view of the protagonist that, while not necessarily narratively consistent, is... at least some other kind of consistent. I remember some guy on the internet who said that, while there is little to no narrative continuity between episodes of the old Twilight Zone series, there was a moral or emotional continuity that connected disparate episodes together. (This may be why it's so easy to parody.) I think that the same thing is going on with the branches of the story in Crossroads, as well. It's pretty interesting to think about.

Conclusion: Crossroads is a good spooky game to play this Halloween season, especially if you like to think about PC characterization in IF, and other junk.