Today I Die

An unusual game with an unusual interface, this piece of work opens with a very unpromising scenario: a woman, tied to a rock, sinks past nasty deep-sea anglers and mangled jellyfish through murky depths indefinitely, beneath a pessimistic stanza of poetry:

dead world
full of shades
today I die

This page from a teenaged goth's diary is an inauspicious beginning, but on the bright side -- starting in such a situation, there's nowhere to go but up! This game is in fact all about finding silver linings on the storm clouds and making the fullest use of them.

Two additional words are present in the eaves, dark and painful, and while the player experiments with clicking and dragging the various scene elements around the stage they will determine that these words can replace dead in the opening lines and grant access to new, equally downbeat locales -- a smoggy and darkened underground grotto and a hellish realm of tormentors, respectively. Gradually, interacting with the game elements (initially, to spoil mildly: illuminating a jellyfish and preventing its being extinguished by the anglers) will trigger new actions and unlock new verbs and their possibilities, allowing the player to re-write the poem piece by piece until it has been adapted into the very antithesis of its initial message, illustrated along the way in vague animated symbolism.