Flotsam

From the Database of Home of the Underdogs

GAME DESIGNER:Jamie Murray
GAME DEVELOPER:Freeware
GAME PUBLISHER:Freeware
Copyright 2001, Jamie Murray

Flotsam is a fun Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game that won third-place winner of the 2001 LOTECHComp. Mark Silcox says it all about this fun underdog:

This game charts the mundane tasks and interactions of a student reluctantly employed at an even-nastier-than-the-norm Irish pub, in what I thought was a wonderfully vitriolic and turgid style of writing. The “oleaginous chuckle” of one punter will be following me around for days. This one also uses the restrictions of a CYOA interface cleverly to keep the apparent pointlessness of the character’s activities clearly in the foreground, without making this fact about them too horribly frustrating to the player, as one could imagine happening in a similar game that used a traditional IF parser. At the end, more or less without warning, there’s a lovely little “liftoff” as the protagonist ambiguously transcends his surroundings. This last feature raised the status of the game for me well above the merely worthwhile and into the realms of the truly memorable. If you enjoy IF games or CYOA books, here is one gem that is well worth a look. Recommended!