Hypertext

Ergon/Logos is a) quick, and b) so cool you must play it at once. If "play" is the right word: It is, when you come down to it, a surreal, poetic hypertext implemented as an action game, if "game" is the word, too.

Hypertext fiction is not intended to be action-driven, of course, which is one reason why this is so weird and original a thing.

Aisle is a one-turn game. Play a turn, and the game ends.

Restart. Try something else. The game ends again.

This isn't a case where working out just the right single move will win, either. (For that, try Andrew Pontious' brilliant but difficult Rematch.) No, Aisle is partly about exploration -- an astonishing number of commands are implemented, ranging well outside the usual set of interactive fiction commands -- and partly about assembling the story that you're interested in.

Each ending tells another piece of story about an event in your past. Some of the fragments work together. Some conflict with one another.

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series of "which-way" (or, if you prefer, "choose-your-own-ending") books were part of an efflorescence of such works in the 80s. (The other two most popular series were the Bantam Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from Ian Livingstone and the UK Steve Jackson [not to be confused with the Texan Steve Jackson], both of whom have gone on to stellar careers in digital games).

The Reprover is a piece of art, and literature, in which the player/reader has the freedom to choose the order in which he experiences new passages. But there is no space for individual agency within the story, no way to make the narrative come out differently. There is also no challenge and no goal, other than the goal (certainly self-selected and individually defined) of getting an aesthetically satisfying experience out of the reading.