Go to the game's main page
Review
When I first began this game I was struck by the first paragraphs. A setting in a psychiatric hospital, a doctor consulting files on magnetic-recordings, something weird had happened: I thought: great, a steampunk setting so well written, with the perfect prose style, with beautiful details. Keeping on reading, I found more great fictional and setting elements: strange technologies beautifully depicted, originally conceived, perfectly fitting to the setting and to the plot.
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.
