Shade

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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.

Screenshots

Promo Images

Alternate Titles

• "Shade: Interactive Fiction" -- iOS title
• "Shade: A Brief Story" -- Tag-lined title

Part of the Following Groups

• Game Engine: iOS Fizmo
• IF Comp 2000 entrants
• Z-Code

User Reviews

More or less linear, but creepy nonetheless

DOS

Mirrorshades2k (282)

Critic Reviews

SPAG	DOS	Dec 29, 2000	8.5 out of 10	85
The Good Old Days (Staff Reviews only)	DOS	Sep 24, 2009	3 out of 6	50

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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.

Related Web Sites

• 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.)