The Witch Girls
I played another IFComp 2025 game on Bruno Dias's recommendation and boy howdy, it's a good one!!
The Witch Girls is a Twine game about two girls attempting to use real witch magic to summon themselves a pair of perfect boyfriends. It takes place in 2005 Scotland and is extremely (but not particularly nostalgically) millennial-coded.
I found it a very effective exploration of what it felt like to be approximately 13 years old at that time - I was 16 in 2005, but I remember all those cultural expectations, those inflexible gender rules. And I remember the places you found those rules expressed - magazines, older kids, and classroom gossip.
The story goes "all the way" with several different plot threads - Stevens takes some observations about teen relationships to some really extreme ends. I was pleased by how gross and weird she was willing to be. There's quite a lot of endings to this game, and flowchart to help you replay and navigate those endings. It's quite satisfying to see how each ending explores a completely different facet of the theme - they diverge quite wildly, and tackle very different kinds of horror.
Personally, one of the things that fascinated me about this game was its window into the normative girlhood of the 2000s. I did not experience "normative girlhood." I was extremely gender nonconforming as a teen, and embraced that quality in myself when I realized it could also function as a form of social escape valve. I was often deliberately excluded from the kinds of rituals and social challenges that other girls put one another through. I remember discovering that if I stopped trying to fit in, people wouldn't be mean to me in the ways that the characters in this game are mean to one another. They would treat me as a strange jester, an opt-in friend whom you could summon only if you wanted me to clown on your behalf, and I was very glad to play that role for them.
I have many sharp memories of seeing other girls treat each other the way the characters in this book treat one another... and sitting to the side, sweating, thinking how glad I was that nobody really considered me worthy of that particular kind of torment. Subsequently, however, the consequences for my life have been pretty dramatic. Learning to hold yourself apart from things as a teen can give you both beneficial and negative instincts with which to navigate adulthood! I'm also very lucky that a lot of the habits I adopted as a kid have been normalized as Valid Ways To Be A Woman now that I am an adult.
I always appreciate the stories that find windows into normative girlhood which are weird and unpleasant and alien enough for me to relate to them, haha. This is a great one, and I think a lot of people will appreciate that about it, too.