AESOP SURVIVOR

Author's Notes. This is a Twine game where there is one winning destination, but many paths to get there as you can see in the screenshot below. There are also many ways to lose the game, falling into a death trap. The screenshot below shows the Twine editing screen: all the death traps are on the left, and the ultimate survivor animal — the mouse — is off there to the right. So, if you want to win the game, be the mouse. If you ever get offered the chance to be the mouse, take that chance!

I thought Aesop's fables would make a good choice for this game. There's usually a winner and/or a loser in Aesop's fables. Sometimes the loser dies (that's what I mean by a death trap), but sometimes the loser is just humiliated. You might be the loser in a fable, but if you are still alive, you get to keep on playing.

I chose the Chapbook Twine style for this since it is nice and clean. One problem I ran into was that it stripped out all the paragraph breaks in the stories, but I think that might actually be a good thing. The 100-word stories all take up about the same amount of space when there are no paragraph breaks, so that is actually a good consistency for the presentation of the stories one by one.

Please let me know what you think! Another game I've added to this project is very similar: Nursery Rhyme Maze, where the goal is to find your way out of the maze and escape. :-)

Bibliography. All the fables here are 100-word fables that I wrote for Tiny Tales of Aesop, which is a free book you can read online. For bibliographical details about each fable, go to Aesop.LauraGibbs.net, and each fable there is linked to a blog post with bibliography and notes. The only fable where I changed the animals to make it fit here was the gnat in the story of The Gnat and the Bull; I changed the gnat to a fly.

Image credit: Survivor Greece (Reddit).