The Water Spirits of the East | Bachelor’s Degree | Interactive Fiction
Written: 2022 Format: Interactive Fiction
A piece crafted for my final creative project as part of my bachelor’s degree, The Water Spirits of the East is a piece of interactive fiction adapting the recurring themes, water deities, and cosmic imagery found across H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories into a single interconnected world.
Built in Twine, it was designed as an entry point into Lovecraft’s ideas for readers who wanted the atmosphere and themes without having to read the Necronomicon from cover to cover.
The game is an interactive story where your choices lead to different endings. It adapts many of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, allowing you to explore how these stories may interconnect, encounter the Lovecraftian horrors within, and determine your fate.
The Writing Process
Like many writers, especially fantasy writers, I’m drawn to Lovecraft’s work as an inspiration. His use of tension and the cosmic creatures that feature as his monsters. Quite a lot of his work explores water deities and settings, the depths, the unknown, and the things beneath the surface, and as I read, I started to notice how often the same imagery and ideas reappear across his work. Adapting that into an interconnected interactive world felt like a natural way to explore those themes while making them more accessible.
Building it in Twine was my first major experience with branching narrative structure, and writing in the second person for the first time was a genuine technical challenge. Both have stuck with me. Branching narrative logic is now central to how I approach narrative design, and second-person voice has become something of a trademark in my writing. The piece itself remains unfinished (there’s more of this world I’d like to build), but what exists demonstrates the foundations of everything I’ve developed since.
