A head-high mirror is hanging on the west wall. As you look at yourself, you get the feeling of looking into the eyes of a stranger. For a moment you wonder what is closer to reality – the reflection in the mirror or the place of your physical existence. You almost expect the stranger to talk to you and wonder if he would answer to a question.
Tower is an parser-based puzzle game with mostly abstract puzzles.
If you’ll allow me a brief tangent–
“We cannot say. Time is not truly fixed.” It turns fully away from you. “Were you admiring our deep time explorer?”
You look at the giant thing. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“No. You have not.” Suddenly a bright blue light appears on the dark thing; you instinctively step back. Was it there all along, darkened? Or did it open, or…appear? You’re not sure. “Perhaps one day the Paradox Corps will undertake similiar initiatives. On that day, we may meet again.”
Paradox Corps by John Evans is written in ChoiceScript (meaning it uses Javascript and is playable on any platform). It involves a “time agency” type plot where agents travel in time to fix paradoxes caused by “Chaos Agents”. The author cites Doctor Who (among other things) as an influence.
“Listen. Something really funny happened to me… I was pretty drunk last night and I can’t seem to… remember his name,” you smile.
“And?”
“Can you tell me his name, please?”
“No.”
“Why?” you ask.
“Because I don’t like you.”
Giannis G. Georgiou’s One Night Stand is a parser game in Quest. The plot can mostly be inferred from the excerpt above. This review contains spoilers.
Caroline by Kristian Kronstrand is a choice-game where you still type things in. That is, you have one or maybe two choices but you need to reproduce what is in boldface (exactly) to move on. I suppose the intent was to avoid the click-click-click syndrome that can affect choice-works where it is too easy to jump by story material without thinking about it.
I did have typos sometimes but I type fast enough it wasn’t too frustrating for me; still it makes me wonder if they’re some middle ground between instant clicking and long typing. (There is also one payoff spot which I’ll write about in a moment.)
After this point are plot spoilers—
Zest features a “life simulator” in Twine by a crew of three (Richard Goodness, lectronice, and PaperBlurt).
A man named Billy wakes up. He has choices.
HHH.exe starts with some graphics ripped from Hugo’s House of Horrors and makes a freestyle glitch-game from the remains.
A.D. Jansen’s Eidolon involves a child with insomnia who finds their way to another world. I had trouble finding a good excerpt to reproduce. There are too many.
It is a bright morning in spring and you are seven years old and a shoal of golden flies is simmering on the surface of the wide river, on the other side of which lies another world.
Ok, fine: here’s another:
And every bit of its disturbing span has been overburdened with stars; at any moment space might collapse under the weight of them.
One more:
Sometimes, when there is almost no light, a strange phenomenon will occur. Things will reveal their true selves to you.
Ordinary things: decorations, appliances, furnishings. They shed their shapes and leave crumpled snakeskins behind.
You are cold with terror. How could you have been so stupid as to think you could handle this quest? Your breath freezes in your chest… and something else slips in. A seeping, grey mist that first fills you up, then starts oozing out through your pores, covering you completely. Your fear sharpens itself into acute awareness, holding you absolutely still, all senses alert. The monsters are there, there and… a gap! You flow along your escape route, noiseless as smoke.
Krypteia by Kateria clearly had a great deal of love put into it. There’s some fantastic shifting images, a hand-drawn automap, and some solid bits of prose. Alas —
If there’s been a theme in the comp games I’ve played so far, it is “grimdark”. I’ve seen dystopias (multiple times), murders (multiple times), black comedy (multiple times) and a game where the objective is to survive by begging for as many days as possible (where you usually die in less than a month).
The unthinkable happened: Femi jerked away from me, turned around and left with determined steps. Her hips swayed in rhythm with her legs. Just before reaching the stairs, she twisted her upper body around once again, bowed her head slightly and tore her long eyebrows wide open. She shot me a look which hit me with the force of a sledgehammer, but with the tip of a dagger. After endless seconds, she disappeared floating through the floor. I stood alone. Deserted. Desperate.
Hannes Schueller’s The Black Lily has a similar vibe to Enigma in that something happened or is happening and you need to reconstruct it. Choosing to WAIT results in questions:
Is my memory already this clouded? What was it that happened next?
 | Rob on Pillage Village: Do Not Touch… |
 | exploradorrpg on Pillage Village: Do Not Touch… |
| Rob on Mystery House (1982) |
 | unwashedmass on Old Father Time (1983) |
 | Jason Dyer on Mystery House (1982) |
Renga in Blue 