I made my first Choose Your Own Adventure style website on Geocities sometime in the late nineties.

It’s probably still there on Wayback Machine somewhere: a Bluetones themed game where they live in a big blue house (in hammocks) and go on trial for war crimes.

Then at the Guardian, I had a play around with Twine, trying to tell stories about our increasingly convoluted politics through interactive storytelling.

When I saw Keith Stuart’s article about Downpour, I was transported back to those geocities days, both in terms of the simplicity of the game creation and how I immediately used it to distract myself from doing something much more urgent.

As Keith says, it is reminiscent of the dawn of the internet as a mass phenomenon, before the social media titans came along and tidied everything up.

“People like making a mess,” says v Buckenham, who coded the game. She told the Guardian:

“They try to make as much of a mess as possible in the little boxes that platforms like X and Instagram give them. So one thing Downpour does is let them make as big of a mess as they like”.

I’m a mess. I like making messes. I’m looking forward to making some more simple games for all the family, and that aren’t specifically about Nazi double agents who became sexologists.