What it is
Perpetūra is a free interactive novel: five interconnected stories, each set in a different era, each following a woman who carries a feeling she has never found the words for. It reads as prose first. There are no character sprites and no stat screens, only a handful of scenes that carry a small illustration, because the words are meant to carry the story rather than the pictures.
Every story branches into three to five routes, mostly different ways of coming to know one of the people around her, and always one solo path where she chooses herself instead. That path is written as a full resolution, not a lesser one. A codex fills in as you read across all five stories: people, places and the details that do not quite add up yet, and each finished story unlocks its own theme song from an original score written for it. All five stories are complete and live now, playable for free in the browser, with no install and no account required.
Where it came from
The five stories start from one wish: to follow the same unnamed feeling across several lives, far enough apart in time and place that the reader has to do some of the connecting themselves. The title screen holds an orrery you turn to move between the parts of the game, and a separate chart, the Atlas, lays out how the five women's lives touch one another once you have read enough to see it. Both grew out of wanting those connections to be something a reader can look at and turn, not just something explained to them in a paragraph.
How it is built
Perpetūra is hand-built: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript underneath, no game engine and no framework. It runs entirely in the browser, saves live on the reader's own device, and the site sets no tracking cookies and collects no personal data. A few settings exist purely for comfort, among them adjustable reading speed and a full reduce-motion mode for anyone who would rather every screen stayed still. Perpetūra is written, designed and maintained by one person.