(You Can't) Escape the Unholy City

This game is surreal. It was written for ShuffleComp.

In it, you find yourself compelled, no matter what you do, to approach (Spoiler - click to show)the unholy city.

The best part of the game is the feeling of dread and the awful feeling of (Spoiler - click to show)waking up from a bad dream to another bad dream.

Overall, I don't know if the ending had enough of a buildup to support it, but I liked this overall.

This is a short and surreal entry, where your goal is to escape… the Unholy city. It is not obvious however who or what your pursuer is at first, as the text focuses explicitly on you wanting to get away from they/it/etc. It is pretty eerie from the start, with the interface going darker as you get closer to your goal (or do you?), embodying a lucid-dream-like of narration - with the sudden jumps.

It’s a bit claustrophobic, with the sense of inevitable failure, hinted by the title. You can’t escape your fate no matter your actions.

I'm the one who submitted The Unholy City to Shufflecomp. It's a "song" (though more like a spoken poem set to music) from Thomas Ligotti, a severely depressed horror author with a severely depressing worldview. (TLDR: he thinks life is pointless and consciousness is a curse, a viewpoint maybe understandable when you live with devastating anhedonia and anxiety for decades on end.) With this game, there are now three Thomas Ligotti-inspired games on IFDB: Skulljhabit, this, and a third one called The Crooked Estate I admittedly haven't played. We're growing the Thomas Ligotti fan community, guys. At this rate we'll have 10 whole Ligotti-inspired games on IFDB by the end of the century!

In the game itself, you progress through a sequence of scenes relating to daily life, which start off normal and rapidly descend into horror. Eventually, inevitably, you end up drawn into the Unholy City. The city itself is never described - each scene ends with you "entering" it. There's only one ending I could find, which of course doesn't result in your escape.

Playing while familiar with the original song is a fun experience. There were moments that I could pick out as being directly inspired by the song, or drawing on it more strongly than other parts. I noted the mundane workaday nature of the scenes, at least at the outset. Before Ligotti became a horror author he was, by his own admission, a severely depressed anhedonic working an office job at a publishing company and having violent fantasies about murdering his coworkers. To say he hates corporate America and everything it represents would be pretty accurate. If you look at his larger worldview and body of work, it's clear that the Unholy City represents all of reality, or perhaps the state of existing as something conscious and capable of suffering. (Though one of the best things about his horror stories is, unlike his nonfiction, they're open to interpretation. You could view it as a real place, if you wanted to.) Knowing that, it seems to me that the game protagonist can't escape the Unholy City because they're already in it, and you can only leave through death. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

The game itself is short, so not incredibly expansive, but has a neat little collection of scenes. If I had any criticism to offer, it'd be that I wish there was more! Would be fun to see this concept taken to more extremes.