Fallen London

Greetings, delicious friends!

Today I want to acquaint you with a dear friend of mine: Fallen London.

Fallen London is, to me, one of the best "choose your own adventure" browser games, and while there are plenty of them out there (check out StoryNexus if you want to find more like this,) there are few that are written with such expert detail, strange and exciting mysteries, inviting art, and superbly delicious words.

The setting is a strange, dystopian London which has, apparently, been stolen by bats.  Today, you begin your journey of this Neathy adventure in a prison cell.  And from there, you begin to realize that perhaps you are not in Kansas any more.  There are as many choices to make as there are places to visit, and if you bring along (or make a few) friends, you can begin to pretend that you are truly in the last decade of 1800's London--albeit without a sky, ...or a sun.

There are devils and spirifers, churches and creepy angel statues.  There are old haunts, dueling societies, and so many mysteries.  You can be good, or you can be evil, ...or something somewhere in between.  But in the end, you should beware of the Bazaar and its Masters--or perhaps you should serve them, instead?

These sorts of games harken back to a, now, old tradition in computer gaming--literary interaction, and while some of the first iterations of this were primitive, they still gave us the chance to explore new possibilities and waste endless hours of our time lost in an imaginary landscape.  Once graphics were introduced, we had new visions to go along with our old ones, but maybe something was lost with their inclusion, too--some sense of our own impression of the world, or that community of people who gathered together to try and make sense of the myriad pathways.  Fallen London sits somewhere between the graphic and the imaginary--giving us just enough hints in the text-based game for us to sort of interpret the pictures that accompany those words.  And sometimes part of the joy is figuring out just what, exactly, those words really mean.

The best part about the game, I think, is that you can play at your own pace.  There is no "winning" or "losing;" there is just the endless pursuit of the mystery--what really happened to London?  What is the Bazaar?  Who are the Masters?  What's going on here?  So, so many questions....

I hope you'll go and take a look at this game, and if you do, please feel free to add Argentrose to your list of friends.  And please don't be upset should you find that I've slipped a knife in your back during the game of Knife and Candle.  Death isn't permanent after all in Fallen London, and you did agree to join the Game.  Didn't you?

Fallen London is made by Failbetter Games.  They are putting out a new, more artistic, graphical adventure called the Sunless Sea which takes place on the Unterzee.  If you enjoy Fallen London, I urge you to take a look at this and consider pre-ordering.

May the bats be with you!

If you click on some of the pictures, most of them will take you to reviews of Fallen London by various gaming sites.