Killswitch is a ~40 minute visual novel / piece of interactive fiction about doing some things that you really, really don’t want to do. It’s centered on a minor act of heresy committed by the Chief, a battle-scarred supersoldier of the Empire with a Capital E, and Reyes, her scrappy little research assistant. Unfortunately for them, the eyes and the ears of the Empire are everywhere…
Content Warnings
Depictions of blood, injury, violence, gore, needles, medical implements, war, a fictionalized imperial military, microaggressions against a fictional class of people, mind control (e.g. of a person who has been cybernetically transformed into a glorified surveillance camera), and misgendering / dehumanizing language (e.g. referring to a sentient character as if they are an inanimate object, not transphobic misgendering per se.)
This is basically a dose of Warhammer 40k-typical badness, but from the perspective of someone who hates doomerism and thinks you should dethrone your local god-king.
Safety + Accessibility
There are UI animations typical of visual novels, including typing, shaking, fade-to-black, glitching, and crossfade animations. I have avoided outright flashing, but due to the nature of this Twine’s janky passage transitions, I would proceed with caution if you are sensitive to that.
There is sound in the form of ambient music.
This Twine has an aspect ratio of a little over 600 by 900 pixels, and cannot be resized. It is designed pretty much exclusively for desktop play. (I mean, I can’t stop you from trying on mobile, but I can tell you it’s a pretty bad user experience.)
Though this Twine is keyboard-navigable and contains image descriptions for all visual elements, some quirks prevent it from being screenreader-friendly. This is a consequence of trying to wrestle Twine into being a visual novel, unfortunately.
To address the above issues, I have created an alternate version of this Twine that is static, soundless, and all around friendlier to screenreaders. Check it out here.
Help! I’m stuck in MarkOS’s psychic prison ):
Click to reveal; spoilers below
the passage with a bunch of “KILL HER ▶︎”’ buttons stacked on top of one another is full of fake links. One of the links is real, though! It says something like “I wont let you” and should underline itself when you hover over it. Click that and you can proceed as normal :)
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This is one of the more certifiably deranged things I’ve created. Not necessarily in subject matter (though that’s bonkers too, to be fair) but in process. Why did I do this? Why did I brute force Twine into being a visual novel? Why about the lesbians from the Warhammer ripoff? Why in the span of two weeks, so urgently you would think I had been burdened with the foreknowledge of my own death?
I don’t know!!
But it’s done, and you get to look at it now :)
I am sure that I will think of things that I want to say about this later, when I regain my senses. For now, I just need to evict it from my brain and subject everyone else to it.
Whew.
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