Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister captures a captivating, affecting story within the limitations of a mind map program.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting when I first clicked through Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister‘s ‘Restore Investigation’ button, but I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere near as drawn in and shaken by the story.
This game is an interactive fiction title created in a free, kanban-style productivity tool, domino2, as part of the recent anti-productivity jam. The jam, if you haven’t already surmised, is themed around the concept of taking a tool designed specifically for productivity and ‘work-related’ use and building out an experience inside it.
As you can probably imagine, that could be pretty tough (despite modern urban stories of Doom running on everything, and that version of Excel having Microsoft Flight Simulator built into it). The workaround, in the case of Lithobreakers’ creation, was to take a mind-map program (a tool for brainstorming ideas and getting them on paper to organize them or broaden them) and stretch out a narrative — an investigation — across the screen.
I’m avoiding spoilers here because I genuinely believe that you should go and play it. But I will say that it’s not just the clever use of the tool that makes this stand out; it’s the phenomenal writing. Across it’s half-a-dozen characters, the writer managed to create a bunch of personalities that stand apart from each other from their first sentences or mentions. These characters are well-written and believable from the get-go, and they’re introduced through logical sequences of events. I love that different note backgrounds are used for different interactions and notes — including notes from the “board creator’s friend” — and that there’s even a little legend and guide in there, all written entirely in character.
Being an expansive, mind-map application it is, as you’d probably expect it to be, a bit tricky to find your way through at times. However, even if you do stumble through things out of order it’s all written in a way that compels you to find the questions to the answers you’ve just read. It didn’t take me long to get through the whole thing, but I was left with questions at the end that I know will never be answered – and I know that I’ll be talking about, and thinking about, my time with the game for a long time.
Notes on the Disappearance of a Sister is playable for free on itch.io.
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