The Coolest Thing On The Internet This Week Is 'Derelict,' An Interactive Horror Story
Sorting through a backlog of emails sounds like the most tedious thing imaginable, but when those emails are pulled from the black box of a deserted space freighter — well, it's one of the most enthralling experiences to be had on the web this week.
This is the premise of Derelict, an interactive sci-fi horror story created by PC Gamer writer Andy Kelly. Developed using Twine, a text adventure "game engine"1, Derelict pits you, some unnamed space corporate stooge, against dozens of unencrypted emails, chats, audio transcripts and system logs. From this mess of information it's up to you to figure out what happened to the Orkney and its crew.
Like most narrative works, Derelict is best experienced knowing as little as possible. You can run through the whole thing in around an hour, and trust us when we say that it's an hour well-spent. Play Derelict now.
Those who have played a video game before might recognize this kind of narrative framing. You, the player, roll up to some abandoned lab/ship/car/house. Normally, at the entrance there's some kind of text or audio log hinting at what might have happened in this husk of a lab/ship/car/house. You then spend the next 45 minutes to an hour exploring — maybe fighting some bandits/mutants/zombies/rogue AI — and digging up more text/audio logs. Eventually you piece together what happened.
In video games this kind of storytelling is usually relegated to cool but ultimately non-critical side plots. Unless you're super invested into the world the developers created, hunting around for bits of text or audio can feel tedious and almost like an afterthought if the main story has, you know, action and dialog and living NPCs.
Which is to say that you could look at Derelict and boil it down to, "Oh, someone took the concept of text logs and made a whole game out of it." But you'd be wrong! You're playing Derelict on a computer, just like the game's protagonist would be — sorting through decrypted data, reading text logs and trying to piece all of this together in your head. And without the distractions of other systems that a Big Video Game presents — the running, shooting, fighting, other side quests you could be doing and so on — you're forced to pull a laser focus on these emails. Emails! Fun!
So, as with any scary story, wait for the sun to go down. Put on some spooky ambient music. And dive into Derelict.
Game engine is in quotes here, since Twine functions more like a tool to assemble a text-based game, but calling it just a tool doesn't quite achieve the same taxonomical effect. Twine games are sort of a genre unto themselves, but that's a post for another time.
