​Interactive fiction equally inspired by Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Alan Wake 2, and Disco Elysium. The protagonist, Elbek, returns to an abandoned house five years after the death of his beloved—and finds her there, alive.

Any seasoned reader/player will immediately assume the protagonist has fucking lost it—pardon me, that some dark delusion has descended upon his soul. And for the first half hour, the text is more than happy to confirm exactly that! Yes, you son of a bitch, you killed your partner; yes, you disgusting piece of shit, you’re hallucinating all of this; yes, you fucking crawlspace rat, now her ghost is going to stab you. Speaking of crawlspaces: that’s exactly where Elbek runs, trying to escape the feral woman—or whatever is wearing her face.

The crawlspace turns out to be a fucking enormous basement. Doors, liminal corridors, and a whole roster of characters: a talking corpse hanging from the ceiling, a tragic homunculus, a kindly ancient witch, and plenty more. Once all the wandering around this world-within-a-world starts wearing you down, you begin expecting the ending to appear somewhere on the horizon. It does not. Not for a long time. And so you keep wandering, adrift, through rooms inside rooms inside corridors... until eventually you enter a room where some of the characters you’ve already met are sitting around, their arcs finally coming to a close—and, you pray to every available god, yours too. Please. For fuck’s sake.

I never managed to fully sink into Elbek’s languid tour of his personal hell. I just started waiting for it to end. Which is sort of a plus—it does make the whole thing more immersive, since you’re suffering right alongside the protagonist—but eventually all you can think is: yes, I get it, I fucking get it, can we move on now? In something like Silent Hill 2, new situations can keep the player hooked. Here, the text feels like it burns through its repertoire pretty fast. New encounters start feeling like reskins of old ones, while the constant nudging to pick yet another option just gets annoying.

And yet, somehow, the constant wrestling match with the narrative and the wildly uneven art got under my skin. A month later, I was still thinking about the damn thing. I’m willing to forgive a lot for that.