The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge

Old Man Bill, a well-adjusted mad scientist in the Dr. Brain vein, has disappeared from his home in the surreal dreamland of Desert Bridge (just take a left at Oneiropolis), and his household's steward, Harold the Talking Picture Frame (Bill's first creation), means to find him in order to restore meaning to the lives of its denizens. Harold recruits Bill's old friend game designer Jonas Kyratzes to rig up a software interface permitting its inhabitants to seek some external assistance from the real world in locating Bill. This assistant is the player.

Using a point-and-click first-person interface (and a hearty helping of whimsical humour) to navigate the charmingly crayon-and-marker-illustrated grounds of the house, the player will explore, investigate and interact with curious characters such as Stripes the dinosaur, Zathras the turtle, Emperor Squiggles the Magnificent (a cat) and a whole host of sentient mushrooms, as well as achieving a deeper understanding of an endless series of fanciful machines (running on gerbil-generated electricity... can you get the dynamos turning again!) and polite robot doors running the Butlerware GUI. Through these exchanges (and inventory management including the verbs "smell", "shake" and "gerbelize") the player will accrue passwords, ciphers, recipes and instructions for traversing barriers and operating peculiar apparati permitting passage to rarified portions of the estate kept under lock and key, and uncover just what has happened to kindly Old Man Bill anyway...

Could it possibly have anything to do with those shadowy armies of Urizen massing in the distance?