Evita Sempai is a short, link-based story about a young woman in 1950s Argentina. She narrates in the first person on her family troubles and her admiration for Eva Peron. Her feelings about Peron are intensified through a personal encounter. I don't know what 'Sempai' means or in what language, but 'semp' words are usually about 'always' and/or loyalty, which fits.
The narration is direct but without much elaboration. In most cases, links telescope out to slightly longer lines of prose, showing runs of actions or little vicissitudes. In places where there's opportunity for emotionality, I felt I was expected to supply it, rather than that the prose would, but the story's shortness and modesty of exposition meant I didn't invest much.
I would have liked to re-read a couple of details in retrospect, but without a back button or transcript available, I could only do that by playing again from the start. For the same reasons I did not want to replay Ms. Lojka, I did not want to replay Evita Sempai. Pauses in Evita are fairly constant and enforced. For instance, four lines can fade in to form a paragraph over twenty seconds. I don't want printed prose narratives to do this kind of thing. I want to be allowed to read and digest prose at whatever is my desired or current reading speed, then have my brain sort the appropriate mental pace afterwards based on the prose content.
Interestingly (but probably not coincidentally, in terms of ways Twine projects are developing) Evita Sempai has almost the same link structure as Ms Lojka: Linear with clickable details on the way, followed by one big choice at the end. The two games also have similar blurbs:
Evita Sempai: "I made a game about family, duty, idealization and heartbreak."
Ms Lojka: "A short game about ignorance, defiance, and freedom—or: self-knowledge, acquiescence, and fate."
What happened with Evita Sempai was that I spent as much time reading bios of Evita and Argentina, to try to fill in gaps I felt might exist in my understanding of the story, as I did reading the story. This didn't help, since detailed history isn't particularly graftable onto or around a game as sparse as this one. I perceive a story that sort of interested me, but I felt I was outside the context and just wanted more detail from the prose itself.
One specific and important detail obviously was intended by the author, because it's a keyword for the game on the Spring Thing site that I only spied after playing, but again, with the game's overall vagueness, that keyword hadn't necessarily been part of my interpretation. Considering this incident (of mine), and the big theme blurbs for Lojka and for this game, and the Famous Baby blurb, and my memory of reading plaques in art museums and sometimes puzzling over their relationship to a work, I'm starting to think the blurbs for these short Twine games are pretty loaded. That is, they can figure much more heavily in the overall interpretation of the work than they necessarily would for longer pieces or different kinds of piece. And I'm not sure how hard authors are thinking about this yet. IFDB is full of Twine games with short content-listing blurbs that don't need or bother to hide anything, but here in Spring Thing where authors are trying to frame story-stories more coyly, it looks to be a harder task.
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