StoryCade

  • Home
  • What is StoryCade?
    • What is StoryCade?
    • Tip Jar
  • Twitter
  • Resources
  • Contact
Home Fear of Twine: The Girl in the Haunted House

Fear of Twine: The Girl in the Haunted House

Play the Girl in the Haunted House
Your exact hiding position is in a pile of dummies. The dummies are made up to look like burned bodies… and so are you. The smell of fire adds a little to that illusion, but can’t quite entirely cover up the smells of cake makeup and hairspray and your own body, a body you are left alone with in a room full of phony bodies.

I don’t like being touched. The scariest moments in horror movies are the ones where hands reach up from graves to grab at unsuspecting ankles. I fear basement steps, the easy access to the back of ankles and the steady darkness are a potent combination.

Amanda Lange’s Fear of Twine game the Girl in the Haunted House plays on those fears. The game is about a haunted house actress at a Haunted Firehouse attraction around Halloween. The mummy-like costume is cold, the pile of burned bodies around you a suffocating mass of dummy flesh, the darkness your primary companion. The scene is set for some good, old-fashioned Halloween fun.

Which is to say that things go wrong.

The strength of Lange’s relatively short Twine piece (about 5 minutes) is in the way it grasps that physical sensation horror. The slow slide of a dummy’s hand along the main character’s flesh. The rising dread. The desire to leave and the inability to do so. These are carried out in both mechanic and text relatively well. Where the game falls short is in its delivery. Horror is at its best when it’s either campy or leaves a lot to the imagination. The Girl in the Haunted House does neither. With a game of such brevity, Lange misses the opportunity to really build the tension for more than a few nodes. The game feels more like an R.L. Stein mystery than fully fleshed out horror.

With the R.L. Stein comparison in mind, another strength of the work is the diversity of conclusions. With a relatively short playing time, there’s no reason not to play through a few times to see how your character ends up. In my experience? Not well.

Mar 27, 2014 Amanda Wallace
Dating Sim: Jurassic Heart3 Twine Games to Introduce People to the Medium
You Might Also Like
 
Twine: Skulljhabit
 
Twine: Even Cowgirls Bleed
Comments: 0

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Amanda Wallace
Link7 years ago 1 Comment Review, TwineAmanda Lange, Fear of Twine, horror games, horror Twine games, Richard Goodness, The Girl in the Haunted House, Twine games564
Recent Posts
  • Whatever Happened to Storycade
  • Kickstarter: the Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti
  • Night in the Woods Is Not About Teens or the 90s
  • Visual Novel: Seduce Me the Otome
  • Kickstarter: Dujanah
Tip Jar
Contact

Email: thestorycade@gmail.com

Name: Amanda Wallace

2014 © StoryCade
Grimag theme by StrictThemes