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A young woman weds a wealthy man who harbors deadly secrets. 

Story contains a total of seven endings — three main endings, three overearly endings, and one bad ending.

Content Warning: violence against women and gore.

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Notes:

Bluebeard: An Interactive Tale is an adaptation of the short story "How Bluebeard Ends," by Andrea Blythe — which was first published in Corvid Queen.

The short story itself was a retelling of the French folk tale, "Bluebeard". A few phrases and lines of dialog in the game have been taken from the original tale. 

Updated 20 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Release date May 25, 2022
Rating
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars
(4 total ratings)
AuthorAndrea Blythe
GenreInteractive Fiction, Adventure
Made withTwine
TagsFairy Tale, Fantasy, Folklore, Gore, Horror, Multiple Endings, Story Rich, Twine
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard

Development log

Comments

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Hi! I discovered this game through your making-of post, which links to a couple of my Twine tutorials. I haven't actually played it yet (though it looks very impressive!) - I just wanted to let you know that the HTML file you've uploaded here is the "raw game data" you mention not having backed up in your post. It can be imported into Twine 2 without the need for any kind of converter. You may find it throws out some kind of error initially (I think due to a recent update to Twine itself) but if you return to the story list it should be right there.

Hopefully this saves you some further Googling if you do ever want to open it up again and make a few changes!

(+1)

Thank you so much! That’s extremely helpful.

I really liked the differentiation between the secret room and other rooms. The change of color was really a huge surprise.

Thanks for playing! I’m so glad the surprise was effective. :)

This was so simple yet I was so captivated by the writing! I'm really glad you gave options to try other endings too (which I felt was important). 

Thank you! I’m so glad you found the options to continue playing helpful. It was important to me to make it as easy as possible for people to get back into the game.

lovely & gripping. bluebeard is such a weird & thorny fairytale and i will never get tired of adaptations of it. this feels like a really natural expansion & exploration. i'm not always a "gotta get all the endings" guy but i ended up getting there anyway, just because i wanted to read all the branches. [MINOR SPOILERS] i found myself really liking some of the overearly endings--bluebeard's frustration at the refusal to follow his script colors interactions with him down other branches really strongly.

Oh, wow, thank you so much. I’m so glad that the early endings worked for you — and that you were inspired to check out all the endings. That’s such a wonderful thing to hear.

Excellent suspenseful writing. The game nudges you forward into its darkness, teasing ways out with its overearly endings. Very well done!

Thank you so much. I’m so glad that you enjoyed it.