i am not totally on board with alley as a character nor with how easy sudden and exaggerated the ultimate plot-idea this game gets at with an indirection that is (to be fair) itself v pleasant. that together w/ the use of interactivity is cool enough for me to forgive it. i like the color theming, and the writing voice that explains difficult words is really sweet! incredibly spoiler-vulnerable; review is suffering from all the tacks and glass im toeing around. unlike a lot of interactive fiction imo this one's definitely worth it

A short and excellent work of parser-based interactive fiction that doesn't really have any puzzles but nevertheless uses its medium to great effect. Really glad I took the spoiler warning in 50 Years of Text Games to heart and went in blind, because there are moments of comprehension and epiphany that were alternately thrilling and devastating, where a single seemingly innocuous line of narration was able to instill a sense of curious wonder or mounting dread (and in the latter case, trying to act on my sudden sense of urgency only let the game twist the knife that much deeper). As John Walker wrote, "to describe [Photopia] is to destroy it", so go play it for yourself to discover what it's about.