I have a bare bones prototype of a game made in twine and I will be honest it needs a lot of work.

The story and main architecture of the game is already planned and I am happy with it. It is the story hooks and pathing that I am looking to improve and for that I would like to give out a early Alpha build for volunteers to critique and provide any dead ends, errors and story beats they find engaging.

Please feel free to send a message if you would like to participate. Thank you for your time.

Edit: Thank you for your interest in the game the final build should be ready for volunteers in one week. I will send links to you directly at that time. Thank you again for your interest this is much better than I hoped for.

Intro

Honestly this is just something i've been ruminating about recently with the new Marathon game on the horizon.

I've consumed a lot of sci fi compared to a normal person, and probably not that much compared to a serious fan. Wolfe, Asimov, Ellison, Sanderson, Card, Strugatsky, Crichton, etc for novels. Blame! jumps to mind for Manga, and I'm sure I could name shows and movies for quite some time even ignoring adaptations and re-tellings.

In general, I like novelty to some extent in my narrative media. Once you've seen enough, you see the patterns, and that can ruin some of the fun. You can have people who just execute a well known narrative perfectly, but it's nice when you stumble across something doing things you haven't seen before, or doing things you'd thought of but hadn't seen executed.

Video games have the potential to do some interesting things, but it's not a surprise that for FPS especially it gravitates to Power Fantasy. "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS WRONG! QUICK HERE'S A SHARP STICK INVADE HELL!" started with Doom (with 2016 actually having some great Pixaresque storytelling itself) and obviously does it well. Being the lone fighter vs hordes is at the bare minimum a fun gameplay loop.

The Games

However there are a shocking number of interesting or well executed plots in the genre as well. I think the big 3 that stand out to me are System Shock (which is sorta cheating as it's also an ImSim), Half-Life, and Marathon (but honorable mentions to both versions of Prey and E.Y.E. and I'm sure I'm forgetting others).

I'm going to skim over System Shock as "oh no the AI has gone crazy and evil" has been done before, and done better (in the same year...by another game on this list). Suffice it to say that Shodan is still a wonderful take on the whole concept. However System Shock does devolve into a larger power fantasy (save the day, stop the bad guy) despite starting as a small and helpless fool.

Half Life, in comparison, you spend most of the time running around doing your best to even figure out what the fuck is going on, and ultimately fail to accomplish much of anything meaningful. The Combine is so soul crushingly vast that even some super fighter like Freeman (which itself has always been odd) amounts to little more than a blip on a dashboard somewhere (as the 2017 spoiled HL3 ending showed...although I can find no working link to that as of right now).

Likewise Marathon, which has some fantastic storytelling in its use of terminals, has you as the objectively broken superhuman slaughtering enemies left right and sideways, and yet you're little more than a Rook or a Bishop for something SO much larger than you, only to find out that it's stumbled upon something even larger than it.

I won't dive into every detail (lots of good ways to do that. Mandalore, Emms, and the classic story website ) but Marathon takes the vastness of space, the standard "what if the AI went nuts/sentient", and so many other tropes and combines them into something quite unique. It's got the feelings of cosmic horror without falling back on "oh look its Lovecraft again" and I wish more games would take notes. Naturally Bungie even then was famous for connecting ALL their lore and that's probably part of it, but I also suspect any payoff for that is long gone after decades of riding the Halo and Destiny "what if heroes shot more bad guys" plan.

The End

With a new Marathon proper finally on the horizon, I'm more optimistic than I should be. Logically I know this is the company that made Destiny and they're still looking to just milk profit out of these things. That said I don't mind it being an extraction shooter or possibly a retelling (or alt telling...) of the Marathon story, and they even seem to understand the vibe that should be underpinning all of it. Either way it had me thinking about just how well the original Marathon and Half Life immersed you into the scale of what you were dealing with by letting you be the badass you are in just about every other game, and having it basically not matter. Either because your deeds accomplished nothing in the scheme of things or because your agency is utterly denied.

I think what really drew me to these games was finally seeing the idea of something like Lovecraft without the literally copy paste of the small port town and the tentacled cthulu monsters. I'd love to know what other games really stood out to people when it comes to SciFi and/or Cosmic Horror specifically. Or if you just agree/disagree on the ones I've rambled about.

Cas' Short Slices were a series of reviews for my favorite short stories, previously posted on reddit. Each comes paired with a full length novel or novella that comes stylistically or thematically close. These are #1 to #5 (by date of posting, not ranking!).

• Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

There are stories to read and forget. There are stories that linger in my head long after, shouting to be remembered. Then there are stories that haunt me like a ghost, that don’t need to shout for me to never let them go.

Selkie Stories… draws you into the heartbreak of a teenage girl lost in the mysteries of her broken home and the stories she tells herself to make sense of it all. It carves a window into her burgeoning relationship with her co-worker Mona and her own darknesses. In the narrator, Sofia writes pain and hope and grief and the reckless desperation only young love can bring.

Even for a short story this piece is brief, spanning a mere three thousand words. But those words pack a hell of a punch, enough to leave me breathless – and that’s a magic of its own.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out How To Be Both by Ali Smith, a Man Booker-nominated novel with similar themes running throughout, gorgeous prose and characters that’ll make you cry.

• Love Is Never Still, by Rachel Swirsky

Sometimes when you chase after something, you find in the end that what you’ve been looking for only exists in the figment of your imagination. Inside your head, the object takes on a life of its own until it diverges from real life. It’s always painful to realize what you wanted all along was never really there in the first place.

Rachel Swirsky takes the classic story of Galatea and Pygmalion and casts all players under scrutiny. Not just the artist and his sculptor but behind them, the affairs of Aphrodite who gave life to a statue and her contentious relations with the remaining Greek pantheon. It’s a love story, but also more than that. This story explores how nature shapes who we are, the many faces of desire and how it can change into something darker, something unpleasant.

I tend to wax over good prose but it’s such a hard quality to define, let alone master, that I have to give it mention here. The descriptions are vivid and strong, each scene painted clear without falling into the pitfall of purple prose. And these words aren’t window dressing – the author knows what she wants to say and how to say it. This story is a long one – more novelette than short story – but definitely well-worth the read.

Read it yourself here at Uncanny Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out Glimpses by Lewis Shiner.

This is a book I really love, and it’s all but unknown in these parts. Ray works as a radio repairman in 90s’ Texas, who finds one day an album by The Doors appearing in his workshop. Only thing is, the album’s never been recorded and released. Over time, Ray learns to walk down alternate timelines into the past – where he has the possibility to change things and make a difference.

Lewis tackles difficult themes such as the obligations of someone trapped in a loveless marriage, alcoholism and the struggle not to project your needs onto others. What’s more, he does them justice.
On surface level, these two are nothing alike but the parallels are there in the characters of Ray and Pygmalion, both of them are looking for something more without knowing what it is they really want.

Want something closer to Love Is… in theme? Try Galatea, by Emily Blunt. A different take on the story, presented in the unusual form of interaction fiction. It’s well-written and considered to be one of the best in it’s genre. Available online here.

• The Dancer On The Stairs, by Sarah Tolmie

There's been a lot of clamour recently for stories that aren't entrenched in darkness and grit. We're all tired of seeing depressing things in social media, in the news. Sometimes all you want is to see a ray of light shining at the end.

Enter The Dancer... where a young woman finds herself awakening on an empty flight of stairs, stretching forever in both directions. She's thrust into another world with no preparation, not even sharing a common language with the people there. Without crichtén - the coin of the stairway - she has no way past the guards stationed on each floor. And crichtén isn't something that can be bargained for. So she wanders on, lost and hungry and desperate to learn and navigate a culture entirely alien from her own.

Why I love The Dancer... is that ultimately, it's a story about kindnesses. From the guard sympathizing with her plight to the old pilgrim sharing his knowledge of the world with someone hapless as a newborn, it tells you that while the world may be cold, it isn't cruel. There are people out there who are willing to reach out to those in want, and to extend a hand into the dark.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Much lauded by /r/fantasy, this book contains much the same warm tones and hope carried by The Dancer... If you haven't checked it out yet, I'm adding my voice to the chorus telling you to do so now!

• Fox Magic, by Kij Johnson

Throughout mythologies there are countless variations of the story of the changeling wife. Selkies, huldras and crane wives play on the theme of captive spirits lured into the world of men by force or trickery.

In Fox Magic, Kij Johnson allows us a glimpse of the inverse through the eyes of a kitsune, or fox maiden. The unnamed narrator grows infatuated with the master of the property on which she and her family resides. The man is married with a wife and son. She is a fox, she does not care. And in this way the story delves into the quiet horror of seeing a person trapped in a waking dream, in what another thinks is love.

The nature of magic is that it's often cruel, giving power to one and not another - easy enough to parallel in the real world. So we have to not just look but see, and realize when it's past time to let things go.

Read it yourself here at Kij Johnson's website.

Hungry for more? Check out The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld by Patricia McKillip. Though she writes with a lighter touch than Kij, Forgotten Beasts... is very much in line with the themes in this short story - how strongly magic tempts when it promises to give you your heart's desire, how affection needs to be a two-way street.

• Second Person, Present Tense by Daryl Gregory

Nobody can choose the circumstances of their own birth, and some people come into being in more unusual ways than others. Most of us create an identity for ourselves through the passing of time and gathered experience. For Terry, it's nowhere near that simple.

The moment Terry comes into existence her parents are waiting to claim her, parents she doesn't remember. The doctor informs her that the drug Zen is responsible for stripping away her knowledge of who she was. Whoever inhabited her body before the overdose, she's gone now and left Terry there in her place. And already she's started to form memories of her own, disparate from the expectations of the people calling her their daughter and wanting her back again.

Second Person... is centered around the themes of self-actualization despite the expectations of those around you. Whoever you were is unimportant, what matters is who you are in the now and in the end, it's up to you to make your identity.

Read it yourself here at Clarkesword Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker. Chava, the titular golem, comes to life during a voyage to a promised future in New York. But the one who's commissioned her dies in an unexpected manner, she's left unmoored to find her own way in a strange new city.