One Bar Left: Texting Stories

One Bar Left is an anthology of interactive fiction played like a text-message conversation. There's no hero to be: someone texts you, tells you what they're going through, and waits for your reply. What you say shapes the night — and not every ending is equal.

The pace is that of a real conversation: messages arrive when they arrive, you read, you hesitate, you answer. At the end, a notebook shows you what the other person let slip and you may have missed. That's when you realise the second read is the real one.

For fans of chat stories, text-based adventures, choose-your-own-path fiction and narrative mysteries: no reflexes needed, just reading, choosing, and living with what you said.

SEVEN STORIES
• You awake? — 11:41 pm. A friend texts you. She needs you to decide for her, tonight, and until morning.
• Do You Believe Me? — A friend texts you from a house by the water. He isn't sleeping. He says he isn't alone.
• They Say I'm Better — A friend texts you in secret from the room where she's being treated. Everyone says she's nearly well. She feels no one is listening.
• No One Came In — 3 a.m. A woman has been found hurt in a room locked from the inside. The police already have their culprit. Your friend is certain they're wrong.
• The Purloined Letter — Past midnight. A letter that could destroy a woman is in the hands of a man too powerful to accuse. The police searched in vain — you might see what they missed.
• I'm Supposed to Be Dead — After Balzac. Someone texts you who, officially, should no longer be alive to write.
• You Said Never to Write — After Henry James. Two people text you. They contradict each other.

Some are original; others are freely adapted from public-domain classics (Poe, Maupassant, Gilman, Leroux, Balzac, Henry James). Finish a story and a literary companion reveals the source work: an excerpt, the author, the context.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND
• Choices with consequences, and characters who remember them.
• Two investigations where you spot the clues yourself and assemble your own deduction.
• Several endings per story, and a gallery to collect them.
• A notebook of clues you can open during the conversation.
• Six languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian.
• Adjustable reading pace, read-aloud, accessibility options.
• A backup code, so your games follow you to a new phone.
• Share a run as an image or an animation.
• Quiet cosmetics (backgrounds, fonts, sounds) to unlock as you play.

A GAME THAT TAKES ITS SUBJECTS SERIOUSLY
These stories touch on distress and hardship. They never treat them lightly: every difficult ending comes with a word from outside the fiction, and real, free helplines stay reachable at any moment during play.

A work of fiction. The helpline numbers shown in the game are real.

Recent changes:
What's new
• Two more stories: I'm Supposed to Be Dead (after Balzac) and You Said Never to Write (after Henry James), where two people write to you and contradict each other.
• Four more languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian.
• A notebook of clues you can open during the conversation.
• A backup code, so your games follow you to a new phone.
• Share a run as an image or an animation.
• Fixes: message spacing, and read-aloud in all six languages.