Psycho Ward

The text adventure Psycho Ward is a surreal dark comedy set in a mental institution. The main character is a nameless patient, driven to escape the institution, who seizes their chance by falling down a laundry chute into the basement while the nurses aren't looking.

Psycho Ward was created using the Dream Weaver authoring system (not to be confused with Adobe Dreamweaver). The interface is similar to adventure games produced by Legend Entertainment in the early 1990s such as Spellcasting 101 and Eric the Unready, where about a quarter of the screen is used to show the actual game text, then there is a small static picture of the current scene (shown from first-person perspective), and the rest of the screen is filled with helpful GUI gadgets that the player can use instead of manually typing in commands. There are clickable arrows for the main compass directions (and up/down movement), action buttons (look at, take, drop, etc.) along with a list of less-common actions the player might want to try (search, punch, kiss), and two lists of available objects: one for objects in the current room, and one for inventory objects the player is carrying, with a toggle button to switch between them.