Descend

Again.
Again.
Again.

What this is

A short-form (in more ways than one) cosmic horror narrative game told one word at a time. Cosmic horror as a genre is famously verbose, so I wanted to try to distill some of its themes and feeling in the most extreme way possible.

I can’t take credit for the conceit – I took the setup-call-response cadence from the game Ord, which I think does a really great job at using this concept to great effect in a variety of different genres. As for the tone, I am indebted to getting really into “The Disintegration Loops” by William Basinski shortly before/during the writing of the game. Without spoiling the ending, it will be become pretty clear pretty quickly where that influence comes through strongest.

What I did

I wrote, designed, and programmed this game in its entirety in Twine. This was my first time using Twine, so this also acted as a learning experience in my preferred method – learning as I go, one problem at a time. The game itself isn’t especially complicated, except for figuring out how to make the call-and-response cadence work, so it proved to be an ideal test case. The limited scope really helped me here, which is serendipitous.

Where to play it

The game is playable in its entirety in your browser on my itch.io page.