Haunted Games

Abbie Gonzalez (2024)

Visual DOS: Integer Overflow is the visual novel that provides narrative background for Gonzelez's Visual DOS, a puzzle game themed around a virtual OS. You are a private investigator, hired by the families of the Visual DOS development team, who've been disappeared by their own corporate master, Visual Corp., after being called into the office for mandatory on-site overtime while crunching to release the new OS.

While serving as a bloody cyberpunk mystery and an indictment of crunch culture in modern software development, this is also an opener to the puzzle game/OS-that-never-existed, Visual DOS.

It's intensely stylish, without its half-toned monochrome images, sometimes animated, effectively capturing an 80s vision of the future, with mysterious corporations and chunky CRT displays in the state-of-the-art tech. However, progress is quickly gated a series of Caesar cypher puzzles, which start out with well lampshaded clues, before rapidly leaning into more difficult sentences that nonetheless resist easy brute-forcing.

While I found this to be not quite the kind of challenge I was up for, if you're an enthusiast of sinister cyberpunk retrofuturism and word puzzles, this could be the perfect game for you, with a promise of blood and realistically written trans characterisation.

Visual DOS: Integer Overflow is available as part of the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2024, whose organisers pointed us towards the game for review. We reviewed the web-playable version of the game.

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