Cold As Death by Gorm 2010 Web Site

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About the Story

This game is my entry for the March 2010 edition of the Experimental Game Play Project. Music was done by Totally Corny Productions and used here under the Creative Commons license.

My first inclination was to make an action game, a little in the style of Earth is a 3D Planet, where in my version you would have 10 seconds to clear the level or the number of enemies would be doubled. However, thinking that I wanted to try something more experimental, I decided to make a text adventure and and see if it would be possible to transfer that adrenalin filled feeling of time-pressure to the text adventure genre. This is also why the game takes place in the cold; the basic idea is that the player needs to keep moving in order to keep warm. If the player stands still for a certain number of seconds, he dies.

In the beginning the time limit was 10 seconds. However, I quickly raised this to 15 seconds as you don't need to type much wrong in order for the time to run out. Having a small trial with an external tester, this time has now been raised to 20 seconds.

So did I succeed? Not sure, as I don't think the continuous pressure gives the player enough time to get emotionally vested. Perhaps a more traditional text adventure, with the occassional time limited choice would work better.

Game Details