|
Have you played this game?You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in. |
Playlists and Wishlists |
RSS Feeds![]() ![]() ![]() |
About the StoryIn the beginning was the Word, and it was hungry.Enter a steampunk adventure set in a London that might have been. The year is 1885. Bedlam Hospital still stands in Moorsfield, a decaying shell used to house the poor and the hopeless. Steam-driven mechanical wonders roam the streets. Gear-wheeled analytical engines spin out reams of thought onto punched paper tapes. And in the darkness - in the alleys and the side shops - hide secrets. Game Details
Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: September 25, 2003 Current Version: 1 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Baf's Guide ID: 2186
|
Awards
Winner, Best Game; Nominee, Best Writing; Winner, Best Story; Winner, Best Setting; Nominee, Best NPCs; Winner, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Individual PC; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 2003 XYZZY Awards
1st Place overall; 1st Place, Miss Congeniality Awards - 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2003)
10th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2011 edition)
7th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2015 edition)
12th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2019 edition)
News
Editorial Reviews
Baf's Guide

-- Emily Short
Gaming Enthusiast
Adding to this very atmospheric narration, great setting and overall enjoyability of experiencing the game, Slouching Towards Bedlam can be recommended to anyone seeking a good and engrossing story.
See the full review
Jay Is Games
Once you start crawling through the game, you'll realize just how story-driven Slouching Towards Bedlam is, and the setting, character interactions and impeccable writing perfectly frame the experience.
See the full review
Play This Thing!
Slouching Towards Bedlam is a great game, without being a perfect one.
See the full review
SPAG
The pacing is superb: the pieces of the story come at just the right moments, the understanding comes gradually and not too slowly. The size of the game is next to perfect for the Comp, exactly filling up two hours in reaching one or two endings and reading the appendices. There are moments that made me completely forget about the real world, and focus entirely on what was happening in the game.
In short: you must play this game.
See the full review
>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page
[T]he writing worked really well, and the coding was similarly solid -- I found no bugs at all. In fact, between the game's puzzlebox premise and its lack of flaws, I've found this review rather hard to write, so I'll just close by saying this: play Slouching Towards Bedlam. Your time will be well-spent, and you may find that it remains with you in entirely unexpected ways.
See the full review
Tags
Member Reviews
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 12 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews

I understood I was reading a beautiful game. My breath was shortening.
But I understood what the game really was when I fell into strange, unusual, incomprehensible messages from the system. I spent hours of wondering what was going on, and when I finally got it, I was kind of illuminated. My mind was cleansed. I found a great piece of Metafiction: the language was part of the world, and I, as Bastian in the Neverending Story, was part of it.
This is a rare game, where the language (both in the prose than in the system language) is part of the story, and one can't go without the other.
The story itself is quite odd, a science fiction settled in a steam-punk 19th century world. Strange machines require the most effort from the player to be understood, but they are great part of the game, and provide the most challenging puzzles. It's a pity that the city, the people, the historical features are not deeply detailed as the devices, but it's
nothing more than a small blot.
This game is thrilling and deeply exciting. Maybe it's too short. Once you get the mechanism, it's over. But it's worth re-playing it: there are different possible endings (Spoiler - click to show)(solutions say there are 5).
Slouching Towards Bedlam is one of the greatest games because of its original work on the writing and language aspects, never so deeply integrated with the meaning of the whole background. And thinking about a medium based on language, I said to myself: at last, what a great deed of creativity. Bow to Bedlam.

First, the positives: The introduction is a superb piece of writing. The reader is immediately gripped by the mystery presented, and that mystery is fully explored in the multiple possible endings. The premise is unique; the atmosphere is memorable. Overall, "Slouching Towards Bedlam" practically shines with the kind of originality that is so highly-prized in the IF community, and this probably is the best explanation for its record-breaking high score in the Comp.
But, then, there are the negatives: The world implementation is a little spare. The NPCs are a little flat. Certain promising points of interest turn out to be either red herrings or truncated plot elements. To be honest, this game strikes me as half-finished in some ways -- the overall tone of the implementation has an unevenness that can be surprising.
Once again, I have to point to the IF Comp guidelines that say an entry should be designed to be solvable within two hours of gameplay. The authors clearly had more to give here, and the half-finished feel to some parts of the game could be nothing more than the result of their having reached the target play time and calling it quits. My suspicion is that they may have run a bit short on development time, however; some improvements in editing would have easily scored an extra star from me.
"Slouching Towards Bedlam" is a decent game made from a terrific story. My slight dissatisfaction stems from my sense that, with more work, it could be an excellent game made from a terrific story. It is definitely worth your time to explore, even if I don't count it among the greats.

The game is about exploration and finding out what has happened in the asylum where the protagonist works. Assisting him is Triage, a hearwarmingly steampunky computer/dictation machine, that can give details and information of the surroundings. While it doesn't actually do anything other than follow the protagonist around and show information on request it is an important part of the whole and the game would be seriously lacking without it.
What brings Slouching Towards Bedlam above others is the way it builds and sustains the atmosphere and mood. The only other game that accomplishes the same is Anchorhead and I would be hardpressed to choose which one does a better job. Another nice touch is how meta-game commands (UNDO, SAVE, RESTORE etc) have been given an in-game explanation. They fit seamlessly into the story, not feeling like artificial additions.
The game is not entirely without flaws, of course. Some gameplay mechanics are unnecessarily awkward (for example making the player type long strings of numbers to a machine one at a time) but my main quibble is that some puzzles feel like they are there only because "IF must have puzzles". They break the mood and yank the player out of the game's world. The authors could have trusted their creation to work as a game without locked doors and hidden items.
See All 12 Member Reviews
If you enjoyed Slouching Towards Bedlam...
Related Games
Other members recommend these games for people who like Slouching Towards Bedlam, or gave both high ratings:Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry Average member rating: ![]() You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.... |
Sorcery Is for Saps, by Hilari Bell and Anna-Maria Crum Average member rating: ![]() As an apprentice sorcerer, you should never steal your master's identity. But what if that's the only way to save the kingdom? "Sorcery Is for Saps" is a 200,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Hilari Bell and Anna-Maria Crum, where... |
Damnatio Memoriae, by Emily Short Average member rating: ![]() 14 AD. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of the recently-deceased Augustus, tries to avoid death at the hands of the next emperor, Tiberius. At his disposal: a couple of old manuscripts, a lamp, and a recalcitrant slave. And a powerful... |
Recommended Lists
Slouching Towards Bedlam appears in the following Recommended Lists:Recommended Horror Games by E.K.
My horror preference is literary with a strong atmosphere, so those types of games will make a stronger showing here than splatterfests, but I have an affection for some of those too. List currently in progress.
Innovative Interactive Fiction by Victor Gijsbers
Much Interactive Fiction, and some of the best, quite obviously descends from Zork and other early Infocom text adventures. But some of it departs from that terrain, and attempts to take the medium to new and unexplored areas. I here...
My Favorites by Grey
My absolute favorite IFs, ordered by preference (roughly)
Polls
The following polls include votes for Slouching Towards Bedlam:Canonicity and IF by juliaofbath
I'm interested in determining whether or not a clear canon has emerged within the world of IF/hypertext. Of course, there is a clear critical opinion regarding which works belong to this tentative canon, but I'm interested in what...
Great Openings by Floating Info
What games have your favorite openings? By opening I mean everything before the first room description in a parser game or the first screen of a choice game. It could be a sentence, a few sentences, a paragraph, or more. But I'm looking...
Game mechanics as story by aaronius
In the best story-centered board games, the rules and system mechanics create or encourage the sorts of stories the game is supposed to be about; one suspense-themed game I discovered recently uses a Jenga tower to create rising dread in...
This is version 14 of this page, edited by Zape on 24 May 2020 at 5:14pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item