by Maki Yamazaki (Twine; IFDB; play here)

(Cover art: The text ‘My Name is Tara Sue’, with ‘TARA’ made out of Twine passages)

You are Tara Sue and, simply put, you lead a pretty boring life. However, things are about to get more interesting…

MNiTS follows a kind of time cave structure, which allows it to be highly branching despite it being so short; of course, the length of the story and early branching allows for easy replay. The scenarios are slightly outlandish, especially towards the end – a whim of the author’s? – but veer towards the grim.

The joy in such ‘boring work life’ games is discovering the secret whims and fancies of the PC which lie behind their urbane exterior, but MNiTS didn’t establish much specifics.

Worth mentioning is the rather attractive layout and scrollback formatting, which made the final story readable as a conventional short story.

Ultimately, MNiTS made use of a mundane concept which, ironically, could stand to be more interesting.