The Usher Foundation VIII: The Spiral

As it happens, I've read the transcripts of the entire Magnus Archives podcast, despite not being a great fan of it, so from the start I was slightly biased against Magnus Archives content. Take this review with a grain of salt.

Like a lot of other games in this series, I wish this was longer, so it had more room to explore its concepts. If the exploration segment was expanded into a several days-long trek through a bizarre infinite living room labyrinth, now that would be cool. I love weird non-Euclidean liminal spaces like that, stuff in the vein of the Backrooms or the infinite IKEA and so on. But this story, like most of the Usher Foundation stories I've played, ends too abruptly.

This may be controversial, but I'm also not a fan of the spelling gimmick. The effect towards the end is neat, but initially those "typos" really didn't jive with me.

This is the eighth in a series of short Twine games based on the central themes of the Magnus archives.

This one is based on the Spiral, associated with the feeling of losing you mind, as well as being lost.

In this Twine game, you are exploring the subway tunnels under NYC after a hurricane as part of your job, when your crew comes upon a perfectly preserved wooden door deep underground that leads into a well-lit, carpeted hallway.

The game employs some clever mechanics to track the feeling of slowly losing your senses.

My five star rating is not necessarily because I would recommend it to everyone as being an exceptional game, but because it satisfies my personal rating criteria in terms of emotional impact and interactivity.