The Thingy is a short narrative game developed in Twine as part of a game writing assignment in early 2020. It is the interactive adaptation of a short comedy script I wrote a year earlier. As the name might suggest, The Thingy is a very loose pastiche of John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Thing.
In The Thingy, you play as a campy stereotypical action-hero trying to save his colleagues from a rampaging monster in a remote arctic research base. Throughout the game, you find and instruct the other characters to either get to safety or hold their positions while the monster progresses up a determined path. If your character encounters the monster, they will deal damage to it but also force it to instantly progress up its path, potentially killing an uninstructed ally. The game ends when the monster is slain, whereupon it reports who survived and who died.
The Thingy is essentially a branching storyline that evolved into a short game when I realized I could loop branches back into each other. My goal in developing The Thingy was to see if I could write a branching narrative with some emergent elements: the player would end the game one way or another, but how they got to the ending was up to them.
The Thingy can be played in your browser via the link below.
Sydney Fonderie 