Contaminated Space

Contaminated Space is a short sci-fi horror-y Twine piece, where you embody a lone(ly) spaceman, dealing with the consequences of entering a contaminated space. In this lonely trip, taken as a break from reality, moving further and further away from home (escaping? fleeing?), silence and space are your only companion. Perfection found in quiet, cleanliness, and simpleness (like the overall formatting).

All contrasted with the contaminated space, quarantined sections of the universe due to their potential danger, horrors that could infect and destroy worlds. None who enter are allowed to leave. Careless with your safety in your goal to reach an impossible unsullied state, you miss every warning sign… until it is much too late.

In your wish to be alone, you are taken over by a whole. In rejecting your personhood, turning into a husk of yourself, you become a host, a filled shell for another. In your aimless journey, a purpose is forced upon you. In your deliberate want to be unbothered, you are disturbed.

This was disturbing to read (in all the best ways). The glitchy-ness of the text, jumbled/broken thoughts, the back and forth between the entities, made all the wrongs so wrong, but all so good too.

This was a mournful, reflective, and gross game by KADW. And not gross in a bad way, gross in a cleansing way, like popping a zit or rinsing a filter until it’s clean.

You play as a wanderer in space who feels listless, uncaring of the outside world and desiring to be completely alone and shut the rest of the world out.

The prose is beautiful. One part made me think ‘I bet the author researched this and thought it was cool’; at least I thought it was cool (talking about approaching the sun):

"No. No one would see anything. At the distance where objects start to burn from approaching a star, they are already close enough to be indistinguishable to faraway observers."

The gross parts happen later, but it’s not so much a bad thing as a transformation, and it ties into the overall themes. There are two endings.

This game reminded me a bit of a fiction story about cordiceps fungi infecting humans, which I heard on the Creepy podcast as the story “madness, mutilation, death”. Very intriguing stuff!