With exams underway, I’m sure most of us have been in pursuit of fun, casual mobile games to keep us entertained during study breaks. But the influx of advertisements for fantasy AI chatbots and choice games seems to suggest that these are our only options. Naturally, this got me thinking about the original interactive storytelling app: Episode. Now, I know we have all been traumatised by the absurdly expensive gem choices and lack of decent storytelling, but this time around, you may find that the new generation of community writers on this platform has completely changed the game.
After redownloading Episode, the new selection of official stories were admittedly cringe, with cliché titles like “Falling for the Nerd” and “Surviving the Mafia Princess”. I rolled my eyes, and I was almost tempted to delete the game again until discovering a gold mine of community stories that encompassed a selection of genres that Episode has never fully marketed itself on. A writer who goes by the name R. Lewis on the platform has steadily become the face of this new era of community writers as she utilises Episode’s free coding software to put out television-worthy productions, with her latest work being a horror story called “Sterling’s Cure”, that remembers every choice you’ve made to scare you effectively. She may not allow you to customise any characters, but that is because her focus lies on telling the stories through dynamic animations done by outsourcing custom limbs from artists and stitching them together to create fluid stop-motion scenes instead of solely relying on the generic reactions and movements offered by the software.
But if you’re still turning to Episode for a cheeky self-insert romance, community writers won’t expect you to spend 50 gems on picking the right dress for your wedding as their focus lies in seamlessly integrating the choice-making aspect into good storytelling. Take the Emmy-worthy love triangle story by Charlie Seb called “Only Pretend”, where the main character finds herself caught between the man she was arranged to marry and the man who was employed to investigate the accident that caused her memory loss. Every episode requires you to make certain choices pertaining to your two relationships that are tallied in a point system that continues to guide you towards one of four endings. Yet you will never be forced to spend any gems to enhance your viewing experience.
While Episode has done a lot of work to taint its own image by releasing vapid, gem-hungry stories, it is evident that the community writers have transformed this platform into a creative space where they have learnt to bend its free coding software to their own will to produce complex bodies of work that entail hours of coding, stop-motion animation, and suspenseful writing. So before you catch yourself installing one of those AI chatbots, consider that even in the space of casual gaming, there is probably an artist somewhere out there who has dedicated their efforts to evoking the experiences you truly crave.
