Bee is an Interactive Fiction game by Emily Short. The story revolves around a homeschooled girl who wants to win a circuit of spelling bees to disprove the stigma against homeschooled students, and that they can be just as capable as anyone intellectually. Much of the game also focuses on her family, including her parents and younger sister, and her heavily Christian upbringing. You make choices to help balance the protagonist's studying with her motivation, while taking her through daily events in her life. As the months pass, the protagonist's outlook on life changes as she is exposed to more of the world.
Bee was Saved from Development Hell. The original version of the game, released in 2012, was made for the now-defunct Varytale platform. In 2022, it was polished and remade for the Dendry platform with the help of another developer, Autumn Chen. You can see the game's page here
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Bee contains examples of:
- Borrowed Without Permission: Implied. The protagonist wrote her flash cards in green ink because Lettice "borrowed" all her other pens at the time, with the word showing up in quotes.
- Growing Up Sucks: As the protagonist gets older, she begins to see the spelling bees as just monotonous chores she has to do to escape her boring life and get her parents to stop bugging her, when before that she genuinely enjoyed them.
- Multiple Endings: You can get four different endings depending on how many spelling bees you win, if you keep the protagonist's motivation up, and other various events.
- No Name Given: The protagonist, and her parents, are never given first names nor surnames.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Lettice's full name is Letitia. But when she was young, she couldn't pronounce her full name, and called herself Lettice. The protagonist says that she "suffers daily from being named almost after a vegetable", but Lettice seems content with it.
- Scrabble Babble: One of the family's activities is playing Scrabble. The protagonist always wins and considers it only slightly more fun than actual studying. In one event, she gets a 50 point bonus from playing the word TOILETS, which also makes Lettice laugh too hard to be able to play her turns.
