I grew up on Sierra and LucasArts games and wanted to build something in that mold, but about the questions I actually think about now: what intelligence is, whether prediction equals understanding, what a mind needs beyond information.
So the puzzles are philosophy of mind, played straight. You operate Searle’s Chinese Room from the inside — following the rulebook, understanding nothing, until a card arrives that no rule covers. Mary’s Room is a location: a colorless room containing complete knowledge of red, and the solution requires physically carrying something out of it. The game has a REMEMBER verb, and memories are inventory items — the final door won’t open for a player carrying facts but no weight.
The frame story is Devs-flavored: a machine called LAPLACE that has already printed a transcript of everything you’re about to do, built by a man who wanted to watch his drowned daughter one more time.
Free, browser-based, works on phones, ~45–60 minutes, two acts, five endings. EGA palette, verb buttons, deliberate deaths.
Honest disclosure: I designed and wrote this in collaboration with Claude — a game about machine cognition, co-built with a machine. That felt less like a shortcut and more like part of the experiment. Happy to answer questions about the process or the design.
https://schwarzarno.itch.io/essel