Oedipus Nix, Reluctant Plaything of the Gods
This ridiculous game requires an explanation.
It started as a pleasant diversion. I needed a break from my everyday writing, I'd come across Twine, and I thought it might be fun to write a very short interactive story. Oedipus came immediately to mind as a good starting point, since the Oedipus tragedy is tied into my Mrs. Quarterhorse stories; and even if it wasn't, Oedipus is a perfect foil for a text adventure, since the point of an interactive story is that the reader can choose their own destiny, whereas the point of the Oedipus legend is that our destinies are inescapable!
The little adventure I had in mind was built around a single joke. No matter what path the reader took, somehow or other, by increasingly absurd circumstances, they would always come to the same tragic end. Once I started writing, however, the original joke was abandoned, and soon I had so many threads going off in so many directions by the time I forced myself to slow down I’d accumulated such a disconnected tangle of passages I briefly considered paddling out to sea and never returning. I'd planned to spend a weekend on Oedipus Nix, but it wound up consuming a month and a half!
Nonetheless, I’m not sorry to have written it, and I hope you will not wind up sorry to have played it!