Shade
Description
Shade is a text adventure game set in a single room, the protagonist's dilapidated apartment, as you prepare for a visit to the Burning Man-alike Death Valley Om Festival in the desert. The closer you get to being prepared to leave to the airport, the more problems befall you -- mundane ones at first, such as thirst and misplaced airplane tickets, and then, grain upon grain, a whole sandbox of more surreal ones suggesting that, as in the movie Jacob's Ladder, not all is as it seems.
With your only, inert, companions a revealing desert guidebook, a helpful task list and an esoteric radio tuned to what must be a campus station, you must ply the hallucinatory depths of a failing brain's rationalisations of its final few perceptions and determine if you're going to take a stand or be taken by sand.
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Credits (DOS version)
14 People (13 developers, 1 thanks)
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 68% (based on 2 ratings)
Players
Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 8 ratings with 1 reviews)
More or less linear, but creepy nonetheless
The Good
Andrew Plotkin is a well-known figure in the interactive fiction community; the quality of his games is fairly well known, and this is no exception.
This is a short story, you can probably play through it in a half hour or so. And while your actions are more or less guided by a to-do list, there is still enough room to explore a bit and do some different things.
The game starts off fairly traditionally, but quickly becomes a little eerie, then spooky, then just downright surreal. I found it similar -- not in the plot itself, but rather in the way that events unfold -- to the film Mulholland Drive by David Lynch (which I liked very much). You get enough information to keep you going, even as things get more and more strange.
The Bad
Much like Mulholland Drive, the ending doesn't answer all your questions about the game. This can be both intriguing and frustrating, depending on whether you are the type of person who likes endings to tie up all the loose ends or to leave you to put the pieces together in your own way.
I seem to recall a couple "guess the verb" situations, where I was trying to do the correct action but was phrasing it wrong. Nothing major, certainly not enough to take away from my enjoyment of the game.
The Bottom Line
This is a quick game that will draw you in, but leave you with more questions than answers. A very well-told story, overall.
DOS · by Mirrorshades2k (274) · 2007
Trivia
Written entirely in the final month prior to the entries' release, this title placed 10th (of 53 entries) in 2000's 6th Annual Interactive Fiction competition, taking an Xyzzy Award for Best Setting and placing as a finalist for Xyzzies in numerous categories: Best Individual PC, Best Use of Medium, Best Story, Best Writing, and Best Game.
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Related Sites +
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Shade @ Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive
Includes reviews and free, legal download of the game's source code and two different versions of the game for Macintosh or as Z-code. -
Shade @ ifiction.org
Play the game online.
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.
Additional contributors: LepricahnsGold.
Game added June 5, 2006. Last modified February 22, 2023.