my father's long, long legs

This is a short work of interactive fiction that functions in the way of a good short horror story: the game strongly establishes its premise, gets the player invested quickly, and concludes with a swerve into an artful and unsettling ambiguity that asks the player to mull over the brief piece of fiction.

I started my playthrough with a general idea of the gist of the story -- (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist witnesses the slow deformation of their father, who obsessively digs a network of tunnels beneath the house -- and found the execution very well done, achieving a deeply felt sense of unease as the protagonist progresses through their story. The player has some sense that the protagonist has survived, as they have lived to tell the tale, but the player also has a sense that the protagonist has been altered -- haunted -- in some essential way. Rather than totally subverting the player's expectations, the game works by slowly unraveling the full scope of the final weird and traumatic encounter with the father.

What I found myself going back to and mulling over after finishing the game was the motivation for the father's digging. This, never fully explained but suggestively characterized, was the really disturbing part of the story. What would cause someone to abandon their life and commit to a toilsome, endless digging? Lutz introduces just enough of the father's perspective to give players insight into his twisted mind while keeping the father still essentially obscured, unknowable.

As a more or less linear story, the game achieves this unsettling experience through subtle atmospheric effects and gripping writing. The linear structure of the game makes the draw toward the encounter with the father feel dreadfully inevitable; but the conclusion, in its ambiguity, makes any consequence, from damnation to salvation, feel possible...but we know in our core that whatever happens after the game ends can't be good.