If you could play an interactive text game involving a town growing, would you prefer to be playing the entity corrupting them or purifying them?

I'm pondering ideas again, and as always I'm torn between the different ways to approach it. I have a feeling a lot of people here would prefer to do the corruption, but personally I think the idea of fighting against the clock to find the source of corruption and stop it, while the environment grows all the more crazy meanwhile.

I do also have an idea for the corruption, namely have the protagonist be a diety of transformation reborn (who has to build up their powers and transform their followers). This option suffers more from the curse of variables, though - in that case I would almost certainly have to allow many different transformation, and having to allow for conflicting descriptions/transformations would be hell to write/code.

I did consider (at least for the purifying angle) that you'd get to set a specific flavor of transformation at the start of the game (macro growth, hermification, etc...) and have that constant during the game, just becoming *more* as the corruption intensifies.

I've gone completely away from trying to do combat in these sort of things, because I just can't make it engaging enough (and I'm not going to invent some brilliant system). So I'm aiming for a more investigative approach, and hope to play around with some of the special functions in Twine for hiding secrets in plain sight.

(Keep in mind that the scope for this is limited. It's supposed to have a number of areas to explore and NPCs that will grow/transform in various ways. The gameplay is mainly going to be exploration of the environment (and maybe a couple of choices here and there).


https://strawpoll.com/cedg2k72