Posted: Nov 22nd, 1:33pm
Zenith — A storylet story
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.