The Dead Tower

Set in a dark and abstract dream world that revolves around a crashed bus, the atmospheric literary game environment The Dead Tower can be freely explored at full-screen with the mouse and keyboard. Like the proverbial moth, the reader's attention is drawn towards the brightest things around: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of Mezangelle verse heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in.

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Built in Adobe Flash, Andy Campbell and Mez Breeze’s explorable poem The Dead Tower stands as an unusual application of the engine. In the tradition of literary games by artists like David "Jhave" Johnston and the collaborative duo Tale of Tales whose rich textual descriptions hover within 3D virtual environments, The Dead Tower invites the player to travel deeper into the space and discover the perfect perspective for reading the rotating and elusive scraps of text. Throughout, fragments of sound haunt the landscape and the surreal architecture begins with the site of a bus crash that pulls the players towards the mysterious tower itself. The aesthetics of the The Dead Tower are built on the remarkable fusion of a commercial 3D game experience with electronic poetry.