Red Door Yellow Door

I was involved a bit with the creation of this game; it's part of Seed Comp, where people put game ideas out there and others make full games of it.

So I made the seed for this game, and I'm very glad things worked out the way they did. I had heard of the Red Door, Yellow Door game online before and even jokingly tried it with my son once but he got creeped out so we stopped right away.

My issue was I didn't know what kind of surreal dream imagery to put in; that's not my forte.

So I'm glad Charm Cochran picked this up, because it ended up as exactly the kind of game I had wanted to play when I came up with the idea: disturbing, creepy, and unpredictable.

The basic idea is that you're at a slumber party and your sister is put into a trance and instructed to visualize two doors, and then you and your friends tell her what actions to take in the dream world.

You soon find parallels between the dream world and your own, but also bizarre features like giant buildings or creatures. The part with Claire's different voices I found especially thrilling.

Literally the only drawback I see is that there are a couple of things that could be polished up. Most of the game is amazingly responsive, with a lot of dumb things I thought of trying having a custom response with an in-game voice, an effect difficult to achieve. But there were a few things like uncapitalized room names or objects that were difficult to pick out from surrounding scenery (like the (Spoiler - click to show)cabinets in the kitchen). I had a smooth experience because I relied on intfiction hint threads, though.

However, those few unpolished moments actually played up the dreamlike atmosphere to me, so I'm not even certain they need to be resolved. Dreams are often like that, enchanting, full of exploration, but with frustrations and occasional non-sequiturs.

My only regret is I don't have other game ideas I could see Charm Cochran's spin on, because this was great.