In the summer of 2023 @manonamora (and the other members of the Neo Interactives) held the Single Choice Jam, an Interactive Fiction contest for games that only had a single user choice.

My entry was Zenith, a game about climbing an impossibly high tower to try and reach the impossibly distant top. My inspiritations were Italo Calvino's Inivisble Cities, Railsea, the movies Labyrinth and Mirrormask, and Christopher Manson's Maze. It's meant to be surreal, and reflective. The story, such as there is, emerges organically as you ascend the tower, with certain levels/chambers revealing aspects of the narrator's life, his (or her) reasons for being there.

Concept

The big challenge of Zenith, of course, was the requirement for only a single choice. I didn't want to make something linear, and I knew that I definitely wanted to make something replayable, so that required some element of randomness. I conceived of the tower as a place of endlessly entwined routes, of stairs and ladders and lifts and ropes and hidden ways where you could climb a hundred times without ever seeing the same places in the same order. In this way you could climb the tower over and again and still see something different.

Then, when you have gone as far as you could go, you get to make the single choice, a leap of faith towards the true goal, or a descent to try again with some other route. Along the way you can accumulate items based on the levels you have visited, which may alter or unlock certain routes. If you descend the tower you keep the items for the next climb, if you jump and fall ... well you start again from scratch. Of course, the items are themselves no more than a record of the rooms visited — you can't choose not to collect them because only one "choice" is allowed — but they provide a diagetic explanation for how some paths open others.

Narrative Design with ...

When I was a child, one of my first encounters with Roleplaying (a hobby that has come to dominate my life) was through solo adventure gamebooks — the likes of Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Way of the Tiger, and the excellent Asterix gamebooks (which included code breaking and menhirs). I was hooked from the first one I read, and bought every one (usually second hand) that I could get my paws on.

Naturally I was obsessed by the concept of making my own, which involved assembling tiny pamphlets from coloured paper and writing them in paragraph by paragraph (with, generally, little to no advance planning). I designed cut-down rules systems based on my Termite RPG, first Grasshopper, and then the even simpler Flea, which had only one stat — Luck.

Later, when I learnt about computers, I translated that love of solo-adventures into early programmed attempts. At that time my tool of choice was the late lamented Hypercard. I designed a Hypercard toolset for makeing solo adventures (I think it was called "Adventure Maker"). These were still text based, but now had a much more complex set of adventure codes and items based on Fabled Lands. The idea being that you could transfer a character from adventure to adventure, in any order, carrying over your magic items, spells, and accolades.

The adventure maker project was probably too fancy for its own good, and I don't think anyone ever played the games other than me. Not long after, however, the World Wide Web came along, and hypertext provided the perfect medium for more solo-adventures. In the mid 90's I was the webmaster for the GEAS Village, which was the grandly named website for the Grand Edinburgh Adventuring Society — the University of Edinburgh's Roleplaying club.

The GEAS Village was a pretty grand undertaking in its own right. It had hundreds of pages: forums, before the concept of forums as we know them; an e...