Pros & Cons
-
- Easily create interactive fiction games
- Little to no coding knowledge needed
- Potential for radical, experimental work
- Free desktop and web app
- Community resources
-
- Sharing games requires outside hosting service
- Altered formatting options require relearning advanced techniques
- Only built for creating games in the text-adventure niche genre
Twine Specs
| Platform | Web |
| Starting Price | Free |
Although it may take years of practice (and a healthy amount of natural talent) to write a great novel or paint a masterpiece, anyone with a pencil and some paper can start scribbling sentences or sketching doodles. One of the biggest hurdles facing game development as an art form is that it lacks an easy entry point. There are many great services for learning how to make games, but they require you to wrap your head around coding right from the start, a steep challenge that turns potential new voices away. Created by Chris Klimas, free consumer game development tool Twine is important and impressive because it lets anyone turn their ideas into working games with little to no programming experience—as long as that idea works as a text adventure. For making anything else, check out our Editors' Choice winner GameMaker.
What Is Twine?
If you want to make games like Minecraft or Super Mario Bros., Twine isn't the creation tool for you. Its output is best described as interactive fiction. This term covers various game types, from a thoughtful and emotional Choose Your Own Adventure-style story on depression to a ridiculous quiz about the Mac Tonight theme song lyrics I banged out in half an hour during my testing. If you envision your game as a collection of interconnected, text-heavy slides, you can make it in Twine.
(Credit: Twine/PCMag)It's no surprise that the majority of Twine games favor narrative and dialogue over play mechanics. Besides, text adventures may now be a small niche, but they also represent a classic game genre. Zork, anyone? Twine strikes a sweet spot between flexibility and ease of use within its genre. Ren’Py is a simple, Python-based program primarily built for dating sims and visual novels. Inform 7 gives you much more power over your interactive fiction but demands more technical knowledge. Inklewriter is Twine's closest competition, as it's also a tool for easily designing impressive text adventures.
Twine's limited scope may turn off more ambitious, budding game creators, but it makes the software incredibly approachable. Whether you're using the desktop app or the web browser version, learning Twine's incredibly friendly tools takes no time or technical knowledge. 2D game development tool Construct also lets you work in a browser.
(Credit: Twine/PCMag)To begin, add a passage, give it a title, and start writing in the basic text editor. Once you're finished, the slide pops up on the story grid. You must do light coding to turn words and phrases into links to other passages, but Twine's syntax is super simple. If you link to a passage that doesn't exist, the editor automatically generates it for a smoother workflow.
As you add more slides and more links between them, the story takes shape before your eyes, tied together by threads. You can even rearrange how passages appear on the grid to keep your story organized. There are multiple ways to visualize how slides connect, so you can pull back and ensure your game works as a playable closed loop. You can also add tags (important for optional coding) and adjust the size of each slide. Twine autosaves your progress. Although using Twine is easier than traditional coding, it still takes patience and work.
Twine's Advanced Features
Twine stories can be nothing but words and connected passages. They're essentially web pages, so you can also give your games some added production value if you know how to code, particularly in HTML. You can edit the CSS stylesheet to change visual aspects such as font, background color, and how links are displayed. You can add JavaScript variables to, say, track how the player is progressing through your story and change elements accordingly. You can even embed images, video, and other media.
Similar Products
Our Current Picks for The Best NBA Streaming Services for 2026
(Credit: Twine/PCMag)Notable Twine developers have used these advanced features for years to add sophistication to their work. Check out games, visual novels, and creative writing by folks like Aether Interactive, Michael Lutz, Zoe Quinn, and others as examples.
By default, the current Twine uses a story format called Harlowe that codifies advanced features the community had mostly come up with. This makes official tutorials more useful and easier to find. Unfortunately, the implementation differs slightly from previous solutions to more complex challenges. The code must be written in a specific, altered structure. So, if you were used to the old way of doing certain tasks (before the Twine 2.0 update), you must learn certain advanced functionality.
You can also use another story format, such as SugarCube, that closely resembles the original 1.x Twine, or just keep using 1.x Twine since it's also still available for download. Note that you’ll have to convert your old Twine files to bring them over into newer versions. You can find plenty of new community tips in the cookbook, Discord, and Wiki to help grow your project. But due to Twine’s text-based nature, you can’t share assets, even free ones, like with Fuze4 or Stencyl.
Playing Twine Games
Once you export your Twine story (no costly yearly license required), you can play it on your computer or any computer on the same network that can access the files from which it draws. However, if you want to share your game online, you must rely on an outside hosting service. Fortunately, several sites are dedicated to hosting Twine games listed on the Twinery Wiki. Philome.la was my go-to choice, but it's currently read-only. Itch.io lets you sell Twine games for money. These sites are also great resources for discovering new Twine games to draw inspiration from. Don’t expect to get your game onto a console or mobile app store.
(Credit: Twine/PCMag)Playing many other Twine games shows you how versatile the tool can be despite—or perhaps because of—its restrictions. Charlie Brooker mapped out the interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in Twine. Stephen Colbert even used it to promote The Late Show. The inclusivity that comes with Twine's ease of use means that the software's games typically feature themes and styles far more radical, experimental, and progressive than average video games.
Although Twine doesn't teach the technical game design skills you can directly parlay into a career in the AAA games industry, it’s far from useless. From Firewatch to Her Story, branching interactive storylines are becoming increasingly prominent in big games, and Twine developers have certainly had success elsewhere in the field.
Verdict: An Excellent Tool for Text-Based Games
Refining your work, looking back on it over a period of time, and making sure it's the best it can be is an essential part of the artistic process. So is immediately expressing exciting embryonic thoughts swirling around in your brain. There's a reason musicians have jam sessions. Twine tears down the technical obstacles keeping most people from experiencing that kind of fantastic free-flowing creativity in game development. Other programs help a certain type of person make any type of game. Twine helps any person make a certain type of game. However, if you want an accessible, powerful tool to learn how to make games across more traditional genres, check out GameMaker, our Editors' Choice winner.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Twine/PCMag)
Twine
Twine is the easiest and most accessible game development tool, as long as the games you want to develop are text adventures.