One Chance

tamakun linked to a game this morning that needs some more attention. It's a very short Flash adventure/"art" thing (as much as that second definition seems to be used as a licence for "absurdly pretentious") called One Chance, and it's done in that blocky Atari style that seems to have been making a resurgence recently because of it increasing the discomfort factor and making things so much easier to draw in a coherent style. Except this time, with a cloth effect over it.



It's difficult to say anything about the storyline that isn't better found out just by playing it, but it only takes about ten minutes from start to finish. It's set over six days in a very small game world - it isn't exactly a horror game, but it shares the same feeling of decay as you explore the locations that you've seen before and find out how they've changed on each new day, especially towards the end of the story. The pace of the game is very slightly slower than I would have liked to facilitate the exploration of it at every turn, but as it's so short, it doesn't really matter too much in the end.

Though the graphics are very simple, they sometimes convey a surprising amount of feeling - and part of what makes the game interesting is the way that it drums into your head that you have a chance to do something, without knowing what that is, and that every decision you make is important. Indeed, once you have completed the game once, refreshing the page will only take you back to a view of the world as you left it - if you want to play it again, then you have to delete your cookies or use private browsing to ignore them (if you're using Chrome, then it's Ctrl+Shift+N; if you're on Firefox it's Ctrl+Shift+P; if you're using IE, then don't.)

One Chance