From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Interactive fiction
This article surveys interactive fiction as a medium for Beach Surgery adaptations. For related games, see Beach Surgery video games.
Interactive fiction naturally formalizes the Beach Surgery conceit: Katita's and Leif's repeated navigation of an impossible architecture mirrors IF's core mechanic of discovery-through-replay. Player choice structures directly encode the problem of adaptation—each playthrough is an attempted finish of the glitch, and no two finishes agree.
Key works include The Parallel Transmission (2014)—navigating Newcastle with two explicitly contradictory endings on Katita's identity; Null Station (2015)—the service station in Infocom-style parser interaction, with ════ dialogue trees locked behind impossible prerequisites; and The Empty World Walking Project—GPS-integrated browser experience where reaching the same physical location twice triggers narrative divergence. ([citation needed] Post-██ functionality unclear.)
IF's textual nature enables polyphonic voice and unreliable perspective. The problem of language ("language can only talk about language") becomes playable: the player reads text about characters reading text. Community consensus suggests IF generates the most unanswerable fan theories, as branching structure destabilizes canon itself. [citation needed]