I am happy to release Lethe 0.6, a second release candidate. The game now starts with the opening paragraph, rather than a description. Gameplay is unchanged.
Lethe is an 'interactive fiction' game with an emphasis on the ‘fiction’ as opposed to the ‘game’. It focuses on narrative and presents the player with decisions of significance to plot and character, as opposed to geographic navigation and basic survival, like shelter and food. It is my ambition that the player will be able to traverse the majority of the narrative content of the script. Disch’s Amnesia manuscript divides into a first section focused on narrative, followed by a ‘city grid’ section, implementation revisions, notes and finally what appears to be some code. The latter parts of the file are difficult or impossible to read due to poor quality scanning of the original paper documents. The city grid content mostly entails navigating Manhattan. It contains some interesting descriptions of New York landmarks in 1986, but – in my view – is surplus to the story. Aaron A Reed and previous commentators, remark on the tedium of navigating the city grid and dealing with
Lethe is getting very close to being complete. In this release, I provide the reader with the ability to resume the story just before the key decision that led them to dying or moving to Australia without knowing what has happened to them. I have also done some proof- reading and testing. Hopefully, I've found and removed the few remaining development comments in the player visible text. I am pretty close to finishing the game. Next I plan to review the web template and the number of decision options presented simultaneously. In the most recently implemented content, I limited these to four options at a time. I will review the earlier content with this in mind. Lethe
On June 16, 2022, the followers of Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games substack received "Bonus Article:Amnesia. The doomed text game from a lauded sci-fi writer with ambitions too big for its disks" . It's a fascinating read, describing how leading science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch and a talented programmer Kevin Bentley wrote 1986's Amnesia computer game. He includes links to the original manuscript, a browser emulation of the original game, and 'Amnesia Restored' - an expanded version produced by a large team of students and faculty at Washington State University. Disch's manuscript runs 436 pages, containing too much material to fit on the floppy disks in most PCs in 1986. T he content represents a challenge to the parser-based user interface common to interactive fiction of the era. It reads like narrative, with some implementation suggestions. The original Amnesia, and Amnesia Restored, match text typed by the player to choices in the
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