T
om Petty was wrong about
waiting being the hardest
part. In fact, it’s the best
part of free, um, sitting game The
Interlude, which is all waiting, all of
the time. It’s about the stuff that
happens in the intervals between
exciting moments: Checking your
phone, staring out of the window,
that sort of thing. In its exquisite
detail, it’s also a strangely
engrossing game.
Ten minutes. The Interlude will
consume only ten minutes of your
time, the game ending suddenly once
those 600 seconds are up.
Your job, as perhaps a getaway
driver, is to make contact with an
associate, but what you do before that
happens is up to you.
As you’re stuck in the driver’s seat,
you can’t get up to stretch your legs,
but you can take a sip of coffee, play a
game of Snake on your phone, or read
your messages for a few tantalizing
scraps of history.
Initially, the thrill is in playing
with your environment, as you mess
about with the wing mirrors, or flip
your wipers on and off to see if you
can. A few minutes later, it’s in
figuring out just why you’re there,
and what you have to do when your
moment comes up.
Ten minutes is both a very long
time, and a very short one,
particularly when you’ve no easy way
to track how long is left.
That’s The Interlude’s master-
stroke. The role you’re there for will
only take moments of your time, but
as you don’t know when it will be
required of you, you’re on edge for
the entirety of the game.
That tension is really quite a feat
in a game where you sit
around, virtually (and
maybe literally) scratching
your behind.79
TOM WAITS
Sitting pretty in THE INTERLUDE. By Tom Sykes
DEVELOPER
CrawlspacePUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
crawlspacestudio.itch.ioNEED TO KNOWYou can play a full-fledged
game of Snake.T
here have been several
games recently that mess
with the fourth wall
separating their fiction from our
reality. Games like Doki Doki
Literature Club, or IMSCARED,
whose self-aware horror spills out
of the game and onto the files and
folders of our PCs. There’s a
transgressive horror to a game
outstepping its bounds like that.
However, as File://maniac shows,
there’s great potential when it
comes to other genres as well.
This is a puzzle game. A damned
clever, yet brief one where you
progress not by pulling switches, or
MacGuyvering things together, but by
manhandling files belonging to the
game. That’s the contents of the
actual game directory, which you’ll
copy, delete, relocate, or rename to fix
problems within the game. In the
fiction, you’re a detective hunting
down a serial killer, but there’s no
reason given for your ability to
intrude upon our world. Instead, in
each room, you’re merely told to
look in the game folder, and given
a strong hint about what you need
to do there to proceed.
To get through a door, for
example, you have to locate ‘door.cfg’
and physically delete it, an action that
also removes it from the game.
Other puzzles are a little more
involved, but only a little, in this
small-scale ‘pilot episode’ for a series
that will hopefully take the concept,
and run with it.
There’s so much potential here, at
the moment largely unrealized. But
even so, there’s a thrill to playing
with a game’s files, and seeing it
respond to your actions in real-time.
This is a game about
playing god. Which, in a
serial killer story, is kind
of appropriate.65
EASY PC
Outside the box in FILE://MANIAC. By Tom Sykes
DEVELOPER
BornFrustrated StudioPUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
born-frustrated.itch.ioNEED TO KNOWThere are several clever
puzzles in the game.It’s a handsome game, with
a cyberpunk aesthetic.The Interlude / File://maniac
FREE GAMES REVIEW