Digital: A Love Story (Christine Love, 2010)

Digital: A Love Story is a text adventure game set entirely inside the confines of a fictionalized Amiga Workbench-esque operating system. It promises that you can, amongst other things:

    * Discover a vast conspiracy lurking on the internet!
    * Save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow!
    * Get away with telephone fraud!
    * HACK THE GIBSON!

It is, at its core, a love letter - an unhinged love for the Internet's days of yore, a romantic's answer to Uplink's gritty cyberpunk facade. It's a wistful recollection of the days when all we did was log onto bulletin board systems, interfacing with pages of text that we ourselves breathe life into, giving these words a face and an identity - a conceit that Digital employs to full effect. It is a time of blocky text and dial-up tones, when the Start button was something that belonged to the future, where the only existence of art was the kind you drew in ASCII.

Digital's greatest thrill, however, is the game's thorough simulacrum of actually entering a place, much like Alice and her Looking Glass, or Lucy and the Wardrobe. It's a recreation of those early days one spends taking tentative steps on the Internet, of those moments spent fumbling with commands in telnet and logging onto your first MU*, or stumbling into a chatroom, wandering through a strange land that feels as though it never existed, not until you stumbled upon it and its strange denizens. It sucks you in, and for a little while, nothing else quite exists, save for that gaudy blue glow of your computer screen, and that string of new messages, waiting patiently to be read.

Download Digital: A Love Story here


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