DOL-OS

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs

At some point, I review enough work from a single artist that my impulse is to turn a current review into a body-of-work overview. I need to resist this impulse, not because Death of the Artist (why would I want that???), but in fairness to the current work. Or perhaps, in fairness to the remaining body of work. To this point, I have admired almost all of this author’s works that I presumed to review, sometimes with qualifiers. Those caveats have given me things to talk about, digest, and clown on a bit.

DOL-OS, for me, was an unqualified, un-caveated success. You’re tying my review hands, work! It presents as an ooooold computer terminal, some archaic dawn-of-windows-like OS. Monochrome (mostly) terminal, visible-pixel fonts, all of it. And the design is just terrifically evocative, down to the messy desktops, the stray game and (working!) internet apps, the trashcan of nearly-deleted files. No clues what to do, just log in (initially as guest) and poke around a bit.

There, you are treated to a wide array of files, images and programs (among a field of ‘corrupted’ ones) that build a mosaic picture of a future dystopia. I cannot stress too highly how well done this is - the graphical presentation is just perfect, from its squiggly ‘corrupted’ files, to its program start screens and tones, to its broken internet. Too, the documents at your disposal are varied, redacted and fragmentary, presenting a picture of life under state paranoia and its often dire consequences. And the puzzles this enables! A clever set of puzzles dialed in specifically to this conceit and environment, integrated in a satisfyingly organic way.

Eventually, you can piece together the password to a user account and… learn of the genesis of the dystopia and perhaps the seeds of its fall. Only then is it clear that you are interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)a distant past, though honestly, the graphical presentation couldn’t clue it more openly. And you engage a final artifact from those times: (Spoiler - click to show)an AI created to render passionless legal judgements, most often capital. At that point you enter a dialogue (on keyboard) until a final, impactful decision.

This was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. Its verisimilitude was top tier, and sucked me in immediately to its world building. I relished the desktop playground constructed for my spelunking. I devoured all the files I could find, for 2/3 of the runtime hopelessly lost in the loose, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces it was presenting. Then the game masterfully closed the gaps, fit the pieces in a satisfying pop, and built to a final conversation of great import. These kinds of mosaic narratives are catnip for me, and finding one this well done makes my heart sing.

So here is the part of my review where I would back off and whine about some detail, some gameplay artifact, some prose flourishes that didn’t quite… whatever. NOPE. I got none of that here. This is a winner folks, a straight up winner.