Hanna, We're Going to School
(CWs: Violence, bullying, vomit, suicide, transphobia, homophobia)
ghosts | slice of life | trauma
"Hanna, we're going to school."
There's nothing to be afraid about going to school, Jing. You know that very well. School is school, as your mom likes to say, it's a rite of passage most adults go through as long as they're not poor.
And besides, high school is going to be the best part of your life. Everyone in their thirties and forties says so themselves. Why would they lie to you? They're always reminiscing about the good ol' days and swear you're going to miss it in the near future.
You're also going to a special school: a renowned international school. Your friends and classmates are going to be very successful. It's a perfect environment to do some networking!
"But you don't want to go to school, right?"
You turn toward Hanna, a ghost who's been haunting you since she died by suicide. Her awkward smile betrays her deep concern for you. You wish you can respond with something meaningful to her, but you can't. She knows as well as you do how much of a sham the education system is.
All you can do is ignore her, walk toward school, and hope Clara won't bother you too much today.
Features:
- Around 12-15k words of high school angst
- Four endings
- An in-built "skip to choices" after game completion
Submitted for Scream Jam 2022+1.
Comments
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Aw, I feel like crying a little after playing this, it's a lovely work.
Thank you, it’s a work I still think about :-)
lovely story(s)... captured the high school Vibe perfectly. cathartic as all hell too
Though wordy, this never felt overwrought or bogged down with too much exposition and the narrator has a refreshingly teenage cut to her internal monologue. A lot of the passages were understandably rough but didn't feel voyeuristic.
Interspersing narrative text with flickering details (e.g. clicking on a word to illuminate more information) and epistolary fragments (Hanna's chatlogs) is something I love about Twine work and I really appreciated its use in this story.
I think this is a very promising start and can't wait to see more from this writer—I especially appreciated the in-depth afterword where their influences were discussed, and the user-friendly skipping functions were deployed extremely well.
This is a spiky, forthright, worthwhile piece of writing. Horror in which the ghost stands as substantially less horrifying than some of the humans is a well-ploughed field, but this still feels fresh—urgent, even.
In good interactive fiction tradition, HWGS also shows off some lovely thought about what IF might do with the seemingly simple act of clicking on text.
[Clara voice] have you ever heard of kawaii
(this is kawaii)
I'm currently helping a friend navigate various systemic obstacles so this was strangely on the healing side of things for me
This was a fantastic piece of work, and I cannot recommend it enough. It manages to thread a pretty solid line between the universality of being a teenager trapped in a system that does not care about you and is actively hostile to whit, along with experiences more relatable to specific subsets of people, all while keeping it all very solidly written.
The endings are also a very strong point here because each adds context and texture to the work and the characters. Reaching a single ending and stopping would be a disservice to both yourself and the fiction, please push on and experience them all and read the afterword. The understanding of everyone involved really brings depth to each ending and the full picture is something I resonate with very deeply.
FInished all the endings.
The game really hit some spots on my end, some being difficult to stomach directly. But it really captures the sensation of being trapped in a system that will never be in your favor, how it fails you but also fails the people around you. Playing through the game blind I felt like I was on Jing's shoes as she stomachs through the bullshit of school, and by god does it hit hard for me.
Ending 1 and 4 really stuck with me with how they diverge from each other and how they serve to parallel several responses to the feeling of knowing a system fails you and that you can't do anything to change it nor make the smallest dent to it.
Got all the endings.
This game is very good, the characters are well fleshed out and interesting. The more realistic approach to the high school setting reminded me of how awkward and difficult navigating that phase of life can be, especially if you are not neurotypical nor cishet.
The Hanna and Jing dynamic is very sweet too and I appreciate how versatile this game is (you don't need to install and can play from any device in your browser). I recommend everyone to give it a try! Short slice of life story with some horror/supernatural elements and takes less than a second to begin.
(very light spoilers below)
Clara, the mean girl bully, is terrifying but she too is a victim of this unforgiving, hostile environment towards anyone who doesn't conform to their assigned roles and is desperately afraid of her real self due to all the queerphobic toxicity she absorved. She's definitely one of the most compelling antagonists from the Mean Girls archetype I've read!
This was hard to read at points but I enjoyed the short story. I was there with Jing during the story’s climax; I found it surprisingly difficult to make that last decision… and ending 4 surprised me as well.
I love the characters - Clara is especially interesting! I haven't played many Twine games before so I don't know if they're common place but I felt like the format was used really well, like how you could click on hyperlinks in the text and it would give you more info and flashbacks. There are some really fascinating discussions about heterosexism, transphobia and postcolonialism here too.
this is the yuri we need in these trying times