This surrealist horror game made entirely in PowerPoint will get your Halloween started right

pcgamer.com:

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