The Choice in “Mama Possum”
Moments Lost
“Moments Lost” is a blog series where I deconstruct a single moment from a narrative game, of any vintage, and talk through how and why it works.
The Game: Mama Possum (2017) is a short narrative Twine piece with visuals and sound, created by Kevin Snow, George Kavallines, and Priscilla Snow, from a concept by Cassandra Khaw. It tells the story of two sisters, co-pilots of a giant mecha that gives them a telepathic bond, defending their home in the American South from enormous invading roach monsters.
This article will contain spoilers for the end of the game. It’s available for $5 on Itch.io, runs in a web browser, and takes about 7–10 minutes to play.
Interaction alternates between clicking linked text and touching buttons on the mecha’s dashboard to advance the story. Only one such option is ever available at a time — except for one particular moment.
The Moment: Near the end of the story, the characters suffer a surprise attack from a swarm of roaches; a malfunction gravely wounds the narrator’s sister and is about to finish her off. At this critical moment, and for the first time ever, you have a choice between two clickable options: either the button to activate the mech’s missiles, or the words “my sister”:
Out the windshield, roaches fly on toward the Arkansas border, leavin us for dead. They’re still in range of Mama Possum’s missiles for a time. But an awful mechanical grinding from across the cab raises the hair on my neck — I know damn well what my sister is about to suffer.
Games have taught us what this is: an either-or choice. We can launch the missiles and save Arkansas, or we can save our sister’s life.
Choosing the missiles seems to bear this theory out:
I pull myself up to the dashboard, all weight off the bad ankle, and lean into the button. Hold down for ten seconds … the floor rumbles as those beautiful steel babies hiss out of Mama Possum’s torso, trails of smoke behind em. No time to watch the fireworks.
Angle of the floor slides me away from my sister. I wear out all my arm muscle, pullin my broke body, till I’m just baby fat and adrenaline.
But if we replay, we see that clicking “my sister” merely skips this first passage:
Angle of the floor slides me away from my sister. I wear out all my arm muscle, pullin my broke body, till I’m just baby fat and adrenaline.
Regardless of your choice, the missile launch and the fate of Arkansas are not mentioned again. The story always concludes with the narrator sacrificing herself to save her sister, and then, bleeding and losing consciousness, remembering “a good time, just in case I die there”: a fleeting image of the home her sister made and what it meant:
I could have driven away, then. Could have drove off with that snapshot and still possess this inklin that my sister had done it. She’d gone and built a household that looked nothin like the one we were raised in. Just threw the whole poisoned blueprint in the trash and make a place love could survive.
Ain’t that its own kind of miracle.
Possum’s one moment of perceived agency — the brief instant the piece becomes multicursal, not just ergodic — has a heightened tension because of its uniqueness, like a single color shot in a black-and-white film. We are meant to feel the moment is important, is special.
But this is not a story about choices. It’s a story where you die for, or perhaps with, a sister, and about that mattering more than whether or not the world gets saved. We might read its one fleeting moment of illusory agency as temptation, as homage to form, or as rejection of a zero-sum binary. Regardless, we are neither rewarded nor punished for our action, because the heart of the story is an action there was never any doubt our character would take.
Additional reading: author Kevin Snow wrote a postmortem of the piece.
