#A tale in the desert download windows#

A story of such layers and complexity of thoughts and emotion could easily end up a crumpled failure, but Kyratzes tells it with a master stroke, indeed, it is quite possible that Desert House alone establishes Jonas Kyratzes as one of the master story-tellers in indie game development. A cute, endearing, wonderful story that gradually peels back its soft-edged veneer to reveal something that is indeed a little sinister, thrusting the player from humor into apprehension into sadness. It is familiar in that it has a tendency to break with convention as well as being a game driven by its plot and story, but it's an aberration in that whereas most of Jonas' previous offerings have been dark and foreboding, Desert Bridge is much of the time whimsical bordering on the absurd.Ībove all else, this game is a story. Are you that cunning person they've been waiting for?Īnalysis: For anyone that is familiar with Kyratzes' work, Desert Bridge at once is familiar territory and a departure from the norm. He does this sometimes, but all of Old Man Bill's creations are starting to get a little nervous, especially now that the power has failed leaving the Horraffe to keep the house alive on back up power.Īnd so Harold has commissioned Jonas to build this window so that one clever and cunning point-and-click veteran could come and help out the inhabitants and hopefully sort out this whole missing Old Man Bill business. Old Man Bill has gone missing (also a totally excellent dude according to the mushrooms), well, maybe not missing, he might just be locked up in his study, but the fish in the bath tub and the rubber duck in the sink haven't seen him in a long time, neither have the chicken in the tower nor the Buttlerware. Harold has a problem, and so do the mushrooms, and Stripes the dinosaur, and the paranoid rabbit, and the Horraffe, and the rest of the inhabitants of the House at Desert Bridge. Who's Harold? Oh, he's a perfectly normal enchanted talking picture frame, a pretty excellent dude as the mushrooms might say. And in this spirit, the House at Desert Bridge is also a window, a very special window, personally commissioned by Harold. If we were to keep following along this train of thought, your browser is also a window, one that allows you to view all kinds of interesting different little worlds including this bit of internet real estate right here. No one knows why this is really, but there you go), and your computer monitor acts as a window that lets you see inside your computer, taking all those ones and zeroes, mashing them up, organizing them, and displaying them into a configuration that is meaningful to you.

#A tale in the desert download windows#

That is, aren't the eyes the windows through which we observe the world around us? And if that's the case, there must be lots of other windows around the dog-eared pages of your favorite book are windows that let you peek in on your favorite stories, your television is a window that lets you observe the antics of your favorite characters (usually they are doctors or police officers. All that nonsense about eyes being the windows to the soul is all very cliché and played out, however if we turn that concept on its head, even just a little bit, we do get something sort of useful. Well, it's not actually a game, per se, so much as a trans-dimensional portal or a window, but if 'game' is more comfortable for you, run with it. Building a ferry teaches you pretty much everything you need to get started in the world and to achieve citizen status.The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge is an unconventional point-and-click adventure game by Jonas Kyratzes, the same developer who brought us Infinite Ocean and Museum of Broken Memories. You start on a small beginners' island and immediately start to discover what you need to do to escape to the main game islands.

It's completely non-violent and relies on players working together as a real community to achieve goals. But that trepidation soon faded to fascination: ATITD is really interesting and very different from most other games in the MMORPG genre. So it was with trepidation that I fired-up the third iteration of A Tale In The Desert (ATITD), an MMORPG based in ancient Egypt.

Also, I've witnessed the harrowing effects of a World Of Warcraft addiction, ravaging friends and colleagues alike, with its demand for more and more gold. I've never been into mythical creatures or hocus pocus, so many games in the genre were an immediate turn-off for me. I'll admit it: I'm not a huge fan of MMORPGs (AKA Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlay Games). A non-violent MMORPG based in ancient Egypt