I am, as both my friends and my enemies will quite happily tell you, many things. One of these things, now and again, is ‘fickle’. Therefore, when Don’t Nod’s latest started to remind me of something, it took me a while to realise what that something was. It was Twine; an open-source tool to create and share stories with multiple paths. Choose your own adventure tales, basically. I’d dabbled with it briefly before deciding it required more time and talent than I could offer, so I didn’t immediately recognise its ghost for what it was.
“But,” I hear you cry (for many are my powers), “choice-based narrative games are nothing new, you fool. They certainly predate Twine”. Although I don’t appreciate the tone of your voice, you’re quite right. However, the memory of Twine snapping into view of my mind’s eye made me realise that, where I thought Harmony was doing something new, it is in fact doing what Don’t Nod has been doing for years, but in a surprisingly transparent way.
