Alphaland

Taking up the invitation of game author Jonas Kyratzes to test an alpha version of a game prototype he's working on, a player will quickly manage to slip between the digital cracks of this piece of software and find themselves reading between the lines, in a virtual landscape consisting of placeholder art and anxious messages from the temporary entity of the game program itself, acutely conscious that its tenure before the next version is released is brief, after which it may never again be executed.

Gameplay consists of minimalist platforming, as players maneuvre a featureless box with the left and right keys, jumping with the space bar, away from vestigial enemies and in pursuit of sporadic power-ups allowing the player's box to access new parts of the glitchy game map. Some allow the box to jump higher, others permit passing through inpenetrable tile types or the removal of other barriers. The story progresses as the player does, the landscape reflecting the game's anxious consciousness.