Interactive fiction
The Intercept
Bletchley Park, in the middle of the Second World War. You are in Hut 14, the door is locked, and a component of the Bombe has gone missing. Harris asks the questions; four people were in the hut, and any of them could have taken it. You can dodge, answer honestly or lie, and the game remembers the tone you take. There is no dice rolling in this one: no fights, no items, no stamina, just the story, your choices and a memory of how you have behaved. Fourteen endings, and which one you reach depends less on any single answer than on all of them together. Your progress stays in the browser, so you can stop at any point and pick the story back up later.
Alongside the game sits the book's Markdown source, read only, always open at the point the story has reached. The book is inkle's own demo for their narrative language ink, brought across by Story Weaver's importer. The English original is untouched; the German version sits beside it as a translation, the same way every book in Story Weaver holds its languages.
Where this book comes from
The Intercept is the demo game inkle wrote for their narrative language
ink in 2016. It was not rewritten by hand: story-weaver import
translated the ink source into Story Weaver. That makes it useful as
evidence. Someone else's text leaves no room for quietly bending
the language around a gap, so it tests the storytelling half of
Story Weaver. 133 nodes, all reachable, no dead ends, 14 endings; the
shortest route through takes 8 steps, the longest 54. It is the only
book in Story Weaver without a rules layer: no dice, no combat,
no items, only narration, choices and states that remember how you
answered. The licences are kept apart: the book is MIT licensed,
copyright 2016 inkle Ltd; the runtime comes from Story Weaver under
MPL-2.0; what runs here is a frozen build.
More from the gamebook shelf
The Crypt Under the Thorn
The starter adventure: one crypt, one goblin, two endings. Done in a few minutes.
The House Behind the Moor
A house on the moor, a fear score, four endings. Richer, and shows every corner of the framework.
Brüder dunklen Rufes
Seven wagons, ten drivers, a man in a patchwork coat with a better offer. The longest of the books, retold from the Over the Hills podcast. German only.
Story Weaver
The language these books are written in: Markdown syntax, semantics inspired by ink, rules from the gamebooks of the 1980s.