This review was commissioned and published by Stuff in April 2019.
Your name is Māia.
You are a kaitiaki, although you're not sure yet of what or whom. You are a skilled fighter and speak the language of birds. You are in the bush when you encounter mangā – ferocious humanoid monsters named after the barracouta fish they resemble. Do you draw your patu to fight the mangā ,or leg it back to the pā to warn the rest of your iwi?
Interactive fiction is a relatively new form of digital storytelling, like a cross between an e-book and a computer game. The reader (or player) makes a series of choices that affect the narrative outcomes and the development of the point-of-view character. Imagine those old pick-a-path books for kids, but published as an app, rather than in print.
Interactive fiction is often solely text-based, but Guardian Māia, the first such work to be set in te ao Māori, benefits from more video-gamey elements, as seen in the visual and sound design. Each page has illustrated borders that reflect Māia's current environment, drawing on recognisably Māori designs and each new chapter begins with a full-page illustration. I found the sounds of native birdsong and traditional Māori musical instruments particularly evocative.
As you play through the narrative, you learn that Māia's iwi in Fiordland are being terrorised by a taniwha named Moko who demands young wāhine as tribute. Gradually more of the world is revealed as you explore. The environment seems both familiar and strange: here are the wildlife and atua of Aotearoa, but something isn't right. The land seems… odd.
One of my pet peeves with interactive fiction is that you often can't go back and make different choices without completely restarting. Guardian Māia has an elegant in-world solution to this: if your choices end up with, for example, the mangā killing you, you can negotiate with Hine-nui-te-pō in the land of the dead to return to various previous points. If, like me, you were the kind of child who used to read through the whole pick-a-path book in order to reverse engineer the "correct" ending, this is extremely satisfying.
Guardian Māia is an excellent work of Māori speculative fiction. It is written in English with frequent use of Māori words. If you come across one you don't know, you can just tap on it and a definition will pop up. The narrative is engaging, and I found Moko genuinely frightening as the story's antagonist. The characterisation of Māia is up to you – her health and mana increase and decrease according to the choices you make. There are three possible endings.
Guardian Māia is the first episode of a larger, planned story from Metia Interactive, an Auckland studio that has won various awards including the United Nations World Summit Award for Cube. Episode one is free, and is up now on Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Guardian Māia is not one for the littlies, but I recommend it for teens and anyone old enough to remember pick-a-path books.
