Andrew Plotkin's "Shade": the [spoiler] is not the terrifying part

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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Here be spoilers, if spoilers apply to a game from 2000. I still think that, if you haven’t played “Shade”, you should go experience it. It’s a short game, and a memorable one.

I think “Shade” was the first IF game I ever played, years ago. I stumbled my way through with blind confusion and a walkthrough, and yet it’s still a game that’s made a lasting enough impression for me to return to it again and again.

Everyone remembers the moment your apartment starts collapsing into piles of sand. Memorable for sure, but also, almost cathartic and cheerful - you know what’s coming, and the narrative highlights that, infusing your actions with a certain destructive glee.

I remember the night. Perhaps because I lived it.

“Shade” starts on an inherently depressing premise. Your apartment is gloomy and barren. Your stereo is standing on a crate - it’s either you couldn’t afford a table, or didn’t care to. Your shade is drawn in the middle of the night, like you’re hiding from the outside world. You’ve been lying on the futon for hours.

>wake up
If only.

Nothing in your apartment could be called comfortable. The closet door is missing, the lamp is tacked on with clothespins, even the lightbulb is uncomfortably yellow and you didn’t care to change it out. The kitchen sink’s broken, the shower is grimy, even the cupboard is warped.

The Death Valley Om, in this context, is an escape. You can hardly call it a bright spot, but it’s something less bleak than your current life, a way to briefly forget how miserable it is. It’s an event you care about, at any rate. You’ve made preparations. You even bought a new high-tech jacket.

>open shade
Darkness is already crawling around the edges of the windowshade. You have no desire to look night in the face.

You’re insomniac, and that gives the world a surreal, apathetic quality. You’re alone, and that loneliness is made all the more acute when you try to leave the apartment. It’s not that some invisible force stops you. It’s that you can’t.

>open door
The sun hasn't risen; what light you have would just leak out into the night.

Darkness is omnipresent in Shade, even more so than sand. Darkness is a malevolent, terrifying force. “Pre-dawn darkness pools in the corners and around the tops of walls.” “The apartment is very dark and quiet of a sudden.” “Blackness creeps around the windowshade.”

And then the taxi comes.
>open door
You do not want that.

You find yourself surrounded with nothing but the sand. But you packed a tent, a blanket, food - or at least, your flashback self did. Where are your things? Where is the festival? Was it even real? Did you come out there to put an end to your misery, by any means necessary?

I know exactly what it feels like - to lie there unable to sleep yet unable to get up, just waiting for the sun to rise. When you want to get out and start walking off into the unknown just to avoid your own thoughts. When there’s something you need to, have to do, and yet - you cannot.

The terrifying part, the really terrifying part, was playing the game and envying the man dying in the desert. For him, the suffering is over - but you are alone with your apartment, and your thoughts, and the night creeping in through the windows.

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A couple more notes (now that it’s daytime):

  1. Some games start out completely innocent and let a surprise twist blindside you (Spider and Web, for instance). Shade starts out gloomy and unnerving, giving the proceedings a sense of pervasive wrongness. Both approaches can be effective, for sure. In Shade’s case, this also serves to give us an effective background on the player character and how and why he would end up in this predicament.
  2. Replaying the game, I’ve discovered a few very clever things - like your glass of water spilling if you happen to have it full when you try to water the plant, or the list reading “Get out of the kitchen!” if you check it at the exact right moment.
  3. Perhaps darkness was meant as a metaphor for death, or for snapping out of your daydream and accepting your doomed fate, but I can relate to the almost literal fear of darkness. Now, in hindsight, the bit about the protagonist perhaps going off into the desert to die was a bit overdramatic - after all, the radio does explain that they went missing on a midnight hike. But it does fit, on some level.

If I ever wrote an “inspired by” game, I’d eschew the twist. Keep it straightforward - here’s your apartment, here you are, and here’s an opportunity that (hopefully) might change your life for the better.
The proverbial taxi comes. You can’t bring yourself to open the door. You’re unable to. The taxi leaves.

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For sure. They appeal to different authors and players / readers (as this applies to literature as well). Both require careful handling, which is a bit of a truism. I once won a writing contest with a surprise twist story that I regarded as throwaway, cheap, and easily foreseen. The feedback I got from the jury was that it was one of the most unexpected turns they had ever come across. I still find that difficult to believe, and it’s been a good many years since.

Regarding Shade, the ominous approach from the start works very well precisely because the player has expectations about resolution, and the game subverts those (to a certain extent). Whether that was the author’s intention is not easy to judge.

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My intentions from back then aren’t easy for me to pin down either. Almost twenty-five years!

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