The Parallax Tomb

by Carter Lovelace

2022
Twine

Go to the game's main page

Review

Unfinished game with a very cool Twine interface, November 9, 2024
by Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid)
Related reviews: Obscure Browser Games

Don't remember how I got this in my bookmarks. Maybe Twitter. Anyway, this can barely be called a game, since it's unfinished. There's only two things you can really interact with, and one NPC, the door, who doesn't even have all its dialogue written out. Some of it is just "DIALOG".

Why bother rating it and putting it on IFDB, then? Because this has one of the most spectacular interfaces of any Twine game I've ever played. Period. The person who made it is a professional web designer, and it shows. This is a three-dimensional escape room, IN TWINE, where you can choose which direction you face at any given moment (north/south/east/west) and the room will rotate as you face that direction. I imagine it's all done with CSS effects behind the scenes, and the end result is unbelievably cool. The flashing GIFs are cool too. Shame there's no substance to it. Not even an ending. You tell the door you'll fight it if it doesn't let you out of the room, and you get an unfinished COMBAT prompt, and that's all there is.

Fine, I lied, there's also a dev page that lets you access unfinished parts of other locations. Some interesting ideas there, but nothing much. Most of the paths kick you out to a placeholder featureless room.

In its current state, the game is just a tech demo. It seems like the creator lost motivation to work on it, which is why it was published in this state. Unfortunate.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment