Kane County

Authors: Michael Sterling, Tia Orisney. Play online

Build played: October 17, 7:11 AM (UTC)

Kane County is a survival simulator. It’s light on story and offers a lot of options at every step.

How did you get into this situation? That doesn’t matter. The real measure of a person is not the bad luck that strikes him or the demons he struggles with, but the personal qualities and life experiences that he uses to face the future.

You are an unnamed athlete or survivalist, which is reflected on your stats but not the attitude. If you don’t want a plot, this is a great one to play.

It is, essentially, a gamebook; it uses a custom engine but there’s little randomness. That said, it looks random for the player because, as gamebooks often go, you don’t know what you choosing from. For example, suppose you have two way choice: you can go explore a cave or you can explore a canyon. And then some stuff happens but you don’t know what it will be.

It isn’t hard; I actually won on the first try, but you should just play and pick anything, because there are several endings. My advice is to focus on the preparation. You really want to cram everything into that inventory.

On the technical side, the game surprisingly looks like it was done 100% manually. I think it’s a really great feat of programming because it’s a big work to track the links and passages.

All in all, it’s a short and simple game. You don’t even have to read all the text because links are self-explanatory. Just go play this already.