A victory ceremony with a dispute about the ending

The story

You wake up outside a pair of enormous hall doors, under a sign that says HERO — PLEASE WAIT. Inside, a kingdom is waiting to congratulate you on a lifetime of adventures you do not remember having. There is a throne, a statue, and a woman the programme describes as your reward.

The narrator calls himself the Director. He is cultured, theatrical, enormously powerful and extremely sensitive to notes. When Vivienne declines to be anybody’s prize, he rewrites her into the villain, and the evidence starts disagreeing with his account.

What follows is a fight over authorship, played out across a theatre company, a hotel with a dead detective in it, a career in villainy, and whatever genre the Director grabs when he panics: a heist, a hospital drama, a musical, a western, a fifties sitcom, a zombie siege. The people you meet have their own reasons for wanting out, in, or on the bill, and the game writes down what you did about it.

How a run works

You give the hero a name and one ridiculous thing you would rescue from a burning building. The game uses both, sometimes against you. From there you read, listen and choose. Choices can split the story and bring it back together, but nothing you did is quietly undone.

• Run one takes the company through opening night and the end of the play, and rolls the credits on the ledger of what you kept and broke.
• Run two opens a career in villainy and a different set of endings. Anyone who got out of your first run is missing from this one.
• Run three is the Director’s problem. He has seen this before, and so, now, have you.

Humour first

It is a comedy: sarcastic, petty, fond of fourth-wall jokes and very fond of the conventions of visual novels, anime and theatre. It is also made with care. The art is painted, the cast perform their lines with faces and poses, and the narration is a real performance.

Content notice

This game is for adults. It has crude language, innuendo, suggestive costumes and situations, and some dark comedy about death, manipulation and contracts. Nothing is explicit. The game shows this notice once when you first start, and a softer-language mode is in the settings.

Who makes it

Created, written and directed by Adam Aragon, and produced by Threesided Studios. The full production credits, including the tools and libraries the game is built with, are on the credits page. Questions, bug reports and fan mail go through the stage door.