Sidewise

This is a compact sci-fi game where you hop between dimensions in order to keep all universes from being destroyed.

The gameplay is classic Inform 7 style: wander a mostly empty building and pick up different objects on the way, unlock a safe, operate a machine, meet an NPC or two, etc.

The story is that you have been newly hired at a tech company when an explosion goes off. Going in to investigate, you soon learn that the company has quite a bit of unusual history...

The game makes references to the (Spoiler - click to show)Mandela effect, with famous examples like the (Spoiler - click to show)Berenstein vs Berenstain bears.

It's fairly polished, even including images and sound. There are occasional punctuation errors, like quotes being left off at the end of dialogue.

The overall gameplay is pretty satisfying. A few puzzles I thought were underclued, especially (Spoiler - click to show)opening the research door. That one I had to string dump the game for, discovering I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)use the magnet to open it.

The game has multiple levels of ending success. There are several ways you can lock yourself out of victory, but those are well-clued. Getting a perfect ending is a little underclued, though, and may require a few attempts.

Overall, I'd recommend this game to fans of classic-style parser puzzlers or to fans of time travel games.