A friend recently told me about some sort of interactive audio story going on via Spotify. Turns out that if you search for “B1W8”, you get taken to a track called “Evelyn” (for the lazy, a HTTP link and a Spotify URI) consisting of a short spoken story that concludes by giving the listener a choice of two codes they can choose from to continue the story.

As someone who can’t resist a bit of a mystery, and who has a small obsession with mapping choices, I couldn’t resist exploring the whole thing. It appears to be a (rather nifty seeming, if selective) advertising campaign for the release of a new album, “Happiness”, by a band called “Hurts”. Many paths lead to (in-game!) death or failure, but a number lead to segments of songs from the album. All in all, I found it really engaging, and while the music isn’t of the sort I normally enjoy, I think I’ll find myself listening to them occasionally on Spotify.

For those who want spoilers, I built a map of the whole story, the source for which is on GitHub.