Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year’s Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest,
which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action
with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember
these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the
creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief “walk-through” that captures the genre’s peculiar narrative conventions.

You
are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There
are several buildings here, including the potter’s shop, the pie
factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned.
(Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the
Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned
ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You
are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond
cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a
magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via