"Dr. Giblet's son Trevor complies, gently settling the refractor on the bridge of your nose. As he pushes inward on the two halves of the instrument, the lenses align and you find yourself staring through the device at a blurry eye chart.."

This game is a humorous text adventure ("interactive fiction") originally written as part of a 'tribute' album of interactive fiction that pays homage to the "Apollo 18" album by They Might Be Giants. It was slapped together in a few short weeks, and is a very short game.

It's written in the Inform 7 programming language, and compiles into bytecode that can be executed on a Z-machine interpreter (or in this case, a Glulx interpreter.)

(Because the source text straddles the fuzzy line between "code" and "fiction", we've released it on the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 license.)

To play the game

1. Grab the latest .gblorb file from the Download bubble to the right.
2. Grab a nice interpreter to play the game, preferably one that supports newer graphics and sound features of GLK-based text adventures. Try either Spatterlight for Mac, Glulxe for Windows, or Gargoyle for Linux.
3. Load the game into the interpreter to play.

If you've never played interactive fiction before: read this simple crib sheet to give you a sense of how the command parser works. It's a limited vocabulary, fairly easy to master.

To modify or compile the game

Clone the mercurial repository using the instructions on the Source tab. Read the README file for further instructions. Of course, we recommend you play the game first, unless you want spoilers. :-)