These Monsters

Developer:
Strangethink
Platform:
Linux, Mac, Windows
Play Time:
short

Monsters with a psychedelic Rorschach test for a face. There are loads of them, sitting in framed portraits all around the walls of Strangethink’s latest procedurally generated galleries. Though motionless, these faces seem inescapable. Each black door you see generates another island of maze-like architecture (all ramps and stacks of oblong rooms), offering a chance—you might think—to warp you to a place with different scenery. But the only end here is happening upon a badly generated world that crashes the game, or closing it down yourself. So you move, non-stop, through these endless realms, the audio washing in and out as you pass through doorways, as if you were moving through cities of underwater coral. Evil television sets sit in toppled piles like washed up corpses on a beach at dawn. Underneath them, pools of black ooze squirm—like squids bathing in their own poisonous ink. On the screens is your only distraction; looping teletext about the monsters, which reads “THEY MOVE IN DARKNESS” or “THEY DWELL IN INFINITE BEAUTY.” Equal parts terror and wonder fill your mind. The monsters stare outwards from the walls.