https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=s8oklhvdqoo5dv4l

You’re a vampire hunter on your night off. You’re getting a manicure, seeing a movie, and eating fast food.

But there’s a vampire in this McDonalds. If you don’t do something, then in one hour it will eat the cashier.

Most interactive fiction is designed to provide a coherent branching linear narrative. Sure, you have many paths through the story and it may have many possible endings, but you are still essentially telling different versions of the same story. Zork II is always the story of a warrior starting in a barrow, battling a mischievous wizard, and finding a secret path forward. Anchorhead is always the story of a woman arriving in a New England town to find her husband missing, exploring the town looking for him, and discovering the horrible secrets that led to his disappearance.

There have been many attempts to write interactive fiction featuring a spatial narrative instead of a linear one. A “story” of this kind would essentially drop you into a situation that could go one of many different ways. Each playthrough would be short, since the goal isn’t to tell one story. It’s to explore every possible story (or as many as is practical).

16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds is a lighthearted swing at a spatial narrative story. It’s not exactly hard to kill the vampire. The real puzzle is to completely explore the narrative space and find all 16 ways to do so.

16 Ways is witty, becomes very puzzley after the first handful of methods, and definitely worth a look.

CW: Religion, blood.

Play in browser.