Towers End Somewhere is a short interactive horror story where you play as a young woman with psychic powers who’s been dared to retrieve an important necklace from a cursed tower.
Her powers come from “the swarm,” a swarm of gnat-like imps who follow her around and whisper a mixture of true and untrue insights in her ears. As you progress through the story and feel your sanity slipping, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the true from the untrue information the swarm tells you.
This was written for a school project about a modern cultural anxiety. I chose to write about the anxiety of fake news and information overload in our society by literalizing it as a monster, the swarm. When we have all the information of the world at our fingertips but it’s so entangled with lies, how could any of us hope to stay sane?
I had originally planned for the ascent up the tower to be in three levels, each a mini escape room focusing on a theme of the class: disgust, uncanny, and terror. The story is fully playable to the end, but it only has one level of gameplay. I’m hoping to flesh out the rest of the tower soon. Hope you enjoy!
The demo is available here: https://dashingdon.com/play/jellynspaghetti/towers-end-somewhere/mygame/
