The Stack

I’m not a fan of zombie apocalypse fiction — I wasn’t even fond of it when I was working on it for a living! But this game is on the periphery of the genre, de-emphasizing the zombie in favor of the apocalypse. You encounter just one infected person, at the very end, and the encounter is fairly brief. If you’ve done everything right, they’re even curable. But that one moment of danger is enough to pay off the tension in the rest of the story.

The story: You’re a survivor driving alone through the uninhabited waste, when your car runs out of gas. You find an abandoned gas station, but the pump is locked, and in the course of searching for a key, you find a secret laboratory, also abandoned, that was researching the disease. I very much like the way that it drives the story with implied motivations that make sense in context: you’re not just exploring for exploration’s sake, you’re specifically looking for that key, or, if you remember seeing a corpse nearby that might possibly have a key on it, you’re looking for protective equipment that will allow you to search it without fear of infection.

In the year 2020, that last detail seems a little ripped-from-the-headlines. Avoiding contamination is paramount — even when handled safely, that corpse can contaminate your inventory in a way that reminded me a lot of Michael Fessler’s room in Cragne Manor. This fear of contact is why you’re alone, and why the only other living soul you encounter is a threat. And in the end, how do you handle that threat? You have the option of handling it entirely from a distance: the controls in the lab’s observation room let you simply blast its entire room with fire, minimizing risk. But doing this in the obvious way also destroys the machine capable of synthesizing the cure. This is the kind of ironic ending that’s completely appropriate to the genre, but it’s not your only option. It’s just that the other option involves putting yourself at risk.

Anyway, it’s a neat little game that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. One aspect I appreciated that doesn’t have a lot to do with the story’s themes: quite a few of the puzzles focus on the spatial relations between multiple rooms, making you think about more than just where you are at a given moment.