Yes, that PowerPoint.
If you glanced at the dismal nightmare of Roche Limit, with its empty pixel art landscapes and figures, you probably wouldn’t know it’s all running in PowerPoint. Leaves fall, eyes blink, and trees writhe in a way that is far beyond anything I thought was possible in a piece of organizational software I have successfully avoided since high school. I remember thinking dissolve transitions were cool, but I guess an entire horror game is too.
Quietly released in 2022 but recently gaining buzz, developer Jack Strait stitched together the “one-thousand-something slide presentation” using gifs and hyperlinks, according to a 2023 interview with him on Game Developer. His first game, The EdCo Incident, was also made in PowerPoint because he lost his copy of Gamer Maker a few years prior.
But it doesn’t sound like that prior experience made Roche Limit any easier to make. One spoilery choice-driven feature of the game required duplicating a bunch of the slides for each branch and manually going through them to make sure all the links were pointing to the right ones.
“It was fun though getting to ask myself the question not of ‘what do I want this game to be?’ but instead ‘what does PowerPoint want this game to be?'” he said.
It’s hard to tell where the limitations are when you see it in action. Roche Limit looks like a point-and-click adventure game that is intentionally simplistic or retro and seamlessly transitions from scene to scene like Monkey Island. If you didn’t have to download a .ppsx file to play it, it presents like any other esoteric horror game you’d find on Itch.io.
The jaunty teaser trailer for Roche Limit doesn’t mention its medium either and I kind of love how it adds to the unsettling vibe when you find out it’s only available through a MediaFire link in the video description. “What if your house was hiding something?” it asks. And even though it says the nondescript house that looks like it’s covered in dried blood isn’t hiding anything at all, the only way you can find out is by booting up PowerPoint 2016 or newer to find out. I suppose that technically makes Roche Limit a Microsoft exclusive: you need a modern version of Office for it to work.
Or you can have the game sent to you in the mail from Strait himself. He says he wants as many people to play it as possible and will send you a QR code with a download link if you email him and ask politely. Shipping is free but he has Venmo and Cashapp in case you want to help cover it.
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