Down

"Darkness surrounds you. 

You can hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing. 
Your legs are heavy as lead.
Slowly sensation returns. It is cold, wet. A dripping sound near your right ear pierces the silence.

Try to move?

Try to struggle?

Try to scream?"

The opening words lead you into a harrowing text based adventure where the wrong move might end in your doom. You find yourself waking in a mud puddle, you can't feel your legs, high above your head dangles a torn rope. 

You have to get out. 

Early access version. You might get stuck. Please use the return arrows on screen in such scenarios.

I started the project after reading the first chapter of  "Playing with Feelings" by Aubrey Anabel for class. We were supposed to make art based on the things we read and despite being quite fascinated by the conversation about affect and how recording history is inherently biased and has erased women and minorities from the narrative, all I could think of was the descriptions of the programmer Mrs. Patricia Crowther squirming through tight caverns on a spelunking trip. 

I am absolutely terrified of the dark. I am absolutely terrified of tight, dark spaces. I could barely concentrate on what I was reading because all I could think of, over and over again, was the few sentences describing her bravery and adventure-lust. 

So of course, that's what I ended up making a game about. It was at first a simple python application. All you could do was enter a number between 1 and 3 to continue, using an old fashioned command line. But my python is rusty and frankly, I am not sure how I would upload that to itch.io. So on recommendation of my peers, I moved the project to Harlowe 3.0 

I have made more complex and sophisticated, visual based projects with Twine, such as Home Invader where you stalk people's eating habits, or my Omer Count Project where I illustrated my way through a jewish holiday. 

But here we are, back at my roots (one of the first games I ever uploaded here was a Twine text based horror adventure). For some reason, I love the horror genre even though I cannot consume it, for the sake of my (literal) sanity. But I enjoy writing and drawing it.

At this time, I'd say the project is about 1/3 to 1/2 done. It is surprisingly tedious to write.