OH THIS WAS WONDERFUL????
Gosh, the growing intensity and sense of foreboding!! I was starting to get paranoid myself?? This drummed up all the sleepless nights I've had and all the growing disturbing thoughts that start to fill my head during those times. Though usually mine are while I'm lying in bed trying to sleep and suddenly I'm hit with a deep guttural fear and my heart starts racing and suddenly every little sound, every little thing I think I sense or feel, just freaks me out even more and makes it impossible for me to calm down. This really brought out a lot of those same feelings in me, so I could relate it to quite a bit.
I think this might be the first game I've played in Twine?? I really loved how you had to click certain words to continue the story forward. It allowed for so much play in like, the emphasis on the words. On what we, as the player, focus on to continue to story. That was incredibly lovely. And the writing itself was so wonderfully done!! The increasing urgency of the words and the descriptions of the sounds and the house and the walls. It started to make me feel very claustrophobic somehow, and so I felt like I kept clicking faster and faster -- UNTIL THOSE MOMENTS THAT MADE ME STOP??? Those were so wonderfully done. The times when things started to change with the text formatting. The flashing in and out. The blurred text. Those slowed me down a bit in a good way, bringing weight back to the words and the moment -- and in a sense, calming down my own sense of urgency, just like the MC. Which then made it even more effective when the final words appeared GOD. Just so well done!! I could tell that so much thought was put into the timing and pacing and formatting of the words. Things like the little knocks showing up back and forth, left to right, making us feel them as coming in from left to right around us.
At any rate, an absolutely lovely little piece -- my heart is still beat-beat-beating a little bit faster than normal even while writing this. A great little work of horror! Even in the end, we have to question whether all of it really was something in the house or just the MC's growing paranoia and sleeplessness finally claiming them. Fantastic!