The great enemy of my sanity is 4.15pm. That’s 45 minutes of workday remaining – just enough time to find and turn around a news story before Julian sounds the Thrice-Girdled Klaxon of Labour’s End. The sensible thing to do would be to pick a nice, easy write-up like “Developers XYZ are still making that videogame they were making before, say it’s going pretty well”. But inevitably, my appetite defeats my reason, and I find myself firing up the demo for something like Project Looking Glass, a cathode ray horror game in which you are a grieving woman participating in secret Cold War astral projection experiments.
It’s the kind of game where you stumble out into a blinding field of blossoms, with a radiant black slab nearby. You walk around the slab and it turns white while the field turns black. You walk into the now-white slab and find yourself in a room with a padlocked door and a television set. You walk to one end of the room and the architecture seals behind your back, leaving you with no option but to examine the TV set… which transports you to another chamber where a humanoid clump of static lolls on a bed.
You are upset and confused and wish you’d grabbed that other news story, about how a lot of people really, really want to buy GTA 6. An extremely “1960s egghead” voice – you know, the kind that sounds like either a chainsmoking Yoda or Captain Picard on helium – drones and purrs in your ear, inviting you to check your map. The map consists of boxes and lines, with placenames such as “A Huge Mistake”. Meanwhile, coloured aquarium light swirls and chases itself across the dim walls, its source elusive.
“This is my second game as a solo indie dev,” writes creator MORPH on Steam. “I hope you really enjoy! The only thing I try to do when making games, or art in general (I am primarily a musician and visual artist), is to try to make something that I myself like a lot. This is a weird looking and strange game and I put my whole heart in to it and I hope you love it. And I am sorry in advance for the bleak ending.”
I’ve yet to finish it, myself, but watch out for some portrayals of death by hanging in the opening areas. The demo gives you 40 minutes to see what the otherworld has to offer. I’m finding it surprisingly open-ended, with some tougher puzzles that are slightly bedevilled by the crackly CRT presentation – you’ll need to gather audiologs and make deductions if you want to make headway through your own terble draems. If you enjoy it, Eclipsium is similar but considerably ickier.
