9 comments
  1. At first, the dialogue option being parroted back annoyed me, but now I see it as a distancing mechanism. I can remember what I chose, and that drops me into the player character. The repetition is a little jarring for me, reminding me of the process of choosing and that I am in a game. This makes sense as I never felt I was ever making choices about Lee, just the superficial things around him. This is a really subtlety smart way to solve the issue of agency is game about a historical event in which I already know the outcome. The choices to find out more info about the fictional familial characters and Hidell function in the opposite way from the parroting dialogue distancer. They give you the option of humanizing/dehumanizing Lee and thus changing your own opinion of him, even though you know what he’s about to do. This player constructed agency is another way of solving the above agency issue.

  2. The images help a lot on understanding and visualize the scenes. The moments when I walking in the building preparing the shooting is exciting.

  3. This game is functional and effective in conveying what it sets out to – an exploration of LHO’s life in the days/moments before the assassination. The game does have some branching elements, but the overarching story is the same. I appreciate that, depending on how confident you are about the shot, the assassin changes. As we don’t have all of the information about the assassination (and, as the author says, knowing won’t change anything), this is a creative way to put a branch in a story about the past, which is usually relatively well established.

  4. Very intoxicating. I loved it. refreshing to play a game made y someone with historical literacy who is bringing their view into sight. I found your visualizations to be strong, and interesting how you switched from BW/Color. Clearly you did substantial research before finishing your twine, and it shines because of it. I would have liked it more if the bolting was manual and your fingers slid from sweat or something, because right now our boy mister cold killer seems a little… ‘cold’. Either way this is very much a success and it’s a good idea to put tags on people so those who are curious can go back and learn more about these historical figures without interrupting their playthrough

  5. – good, appropriate image insertions
    – the dialogue option being repeated in the next passage is a little annoying–perhaps word the transition word differently from the actual dialogue, e.g. “she replied” + adverb.
    – the ending screen is a bit disappointing–let us decide what happened, even if it’s not the truth–the meta text style really brings you out of the immersion
    – check spelling/grammar–try to keep it consistent since it’s a “historical fiction”

  6. Ending was too sudden to me. Besides the fact that we know he is going to kill JFK, I sort of expected a longer drawn out narrative for his final moments after the shooting and what happened again in the wake of that. Good way of subtly introducing new characters though. Exploring the final scene of the shooting was entertaining as well.

  7. I enjoy the way one of the decisions you make has a sort of butterfly effect; that speaks to me about the way that the tiniest details can totally shift how a historical event is remembered, but I hadn’t realized that that decision had such an effect until I read the comments. If getting players with shorter attention spans to explore multiple branches is an important element to you, you may want to think about ways to focus curiosity around those moments.

  8. I read about the major events of the 20th century as a hobby, and so I found it both alarming and interesting to be placed in the shoes of a man who directly changed history, whom media commonly portrays as some kind of murderous madman.

    In the end, Lee Harvey Oswald was ultimately a human being like the rest of us. Atrocities in history are just about always touted as “doing the right thing” or “what must be done”. That being said, each and every one of us is fully capable of performing horrific deeds, as we are just as human as the monsters we condemn.

  9. I’m not sure how much agency I had… like could I have avoided killing the president? Anyway the ending seemed to explicit, you specifically wrote everything out. You told us it was irrelevant, but in telling us this you sort of discredited your story and it seemed excessively modest.

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