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Heatsick

Created: 2025-11-01 (09:32:32)
Status: completed

Play on Itch or play here

Short interactive fiction piece about throwing loose change, treasured items, even your annoying housemates into a well to drive off the summersickness.

I wrote this in four hours for the ECTOCOMP 2025 La Petite Mort category. It was very enjoyable to write something in such a compressed timeframe!

This was also an excuse to try out the Twine Chapbook format, which is designed to be easier to work with and generate stories in a more readable format. Working with other formats often feels like pushing at the limits of what this tool can do. I appreciate that this one has a opinionated design, that it deliberately constrains you to telling interactive stories with it and not dungeon crawlers or role-playing games.

Heatsick is about feeling trapped by the summer heat, by your accumulating failures and by the sheer oversaturated presence of other people.

There is a dry well like the one in this story, hidden out in the bushland near my apartment. I also lived for several years in a sharehouse full of eccentrics, gamers, potheads and thumping techno enthusiasts who played music at all hours. Unlike my protagonis, I adored the chaos of living with so many other people, the spontaneous parties and pubcrawls, even just spacing out on the living room couch watching someone else play Metal Gear Solid.

All to say my real life has never involved a compulsion to push housemates down wells in the woods. But hey, if you have, then this might be the story for you?

Endmatter

Tags: @completed @fiction @my-games @twine @virtual-spaces

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