This fictional CD-ROM about a Knightmare-style game show is secretly this year’s best horror game
Frontiers Of The Mind is cursed, by which I mean that 7-Zip turned red while I was extracting the file. What unsightly encounter deep within the bowels of my download file caused this temporary anomaly? No time to think about that. After playing this horror game, I’ve now got too many other questions.
Presented as an interactive CD-ROM experience (rad!) documenting the history of a fictional, Knightmare inspired kids show, Frontiers Of The Mind instills each click with a mounting unease as you explore its archives.
Between 1987 and 1994, the British channel Network7 broadcasted 112 episodes of the TV game show Maze Masters, an interactive adventure targeting younger audiences. Only some parts of the show were aired.
The different sections of this CD-ROM explore the format and the backstage of the show. The idea is to shed a new light on the strange events which have been revealed afterwards.
It pulls a sort of Hitchcockian horror. Going in, you know that awful reveals await - the tension is in slowly unraveling the details by browsing the folders, and discovering more about the show’s history. Ganzfeld tests. Post-show paraphysic cleansing. A dungeon master with a migraine-inducing stare. "Bertram left his mark on a whole generation of viewers". I, uh. Yes. I bet he did.
This is all brought to life through extremely evocative but suitably detached documentary-style prose storytelling, and snapshots of ‘footage’ that are both circumstantially convincing and also deeply haunted if you stop to think about what you’re actually looking at. Both the sludgey, spacy soundtrack and the image editing work are especially brilliant - somewhere between an SCP and that dodgy VHS that came with the DragonStrike board game.
It’s masterfully done: nostalgic, creative, horrible, and delicious. You can find it on Itch.io here.
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