With well-developed characters, lively writing, and Michael Cho's stylish illustrations, Everybody Dies draws readers into a fictional world that is at once resolutely ordinary and slightly surreal. The puzzles are on the whole easily navigated, though the right verb can at times seem a bit elusive, and the narrative arc is clearly traceable, as even the title might suggest.
Author description: Everybody Dies starts with a chubby metalhead, Graham, who has smoked his last smoke and realized that throwing that shopping cart over the bridge was not the great idea he thought it was, even if it did get him out of washroom duty at Cost Cutters.
Instructions: The commands used are common to much interactive fiction, e.g. GO, EXAMINE (X), TAKE, GIVE. You can also see what you're carrying with the INVENTORY (or I) command. LOOK (or L) will describe your surroundings and WAIT will pass the time without doing anything. To ask another character to do something - say you wanted to ask Joe to eat an egg - try JOE, EAT EGG. If you prefer that the full description of places you've been before are listed each time you visit and not just the first time, you can use the VERBOSE command. You can SAVE and RESTORE the game, but dying is a part of life, and for most of the game unavoidable.
Previous publication: Everybody Dies won bronze at IFComp 2008, the 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
