Secret Squirrel
Text exchange made for Bitsy Jam 99 - TEXT ONLY
User-input implemented with the dialog prompt hack from Sean S. LeBlanc.
Explore the margins of your city to find the code for a usb dead drop.
Okay, so this game is not strictly text only. I wanted to replicate the signage and typography around my city, and could not help adding in flash drives, metal structs and wire fencing. It is at least text heavy!
Secret Squirrel is the name for a network of stormwater drains near me where people go urbexing. But secret squirreling could also plausibly work as a term for making clandestine, offline exchanges.
Half the graffiti, scrawling and signage reproduces real things found while out walking. The rest was made by squishing things together to make weird little phrases.
I'm not too sure how well it all coheres, in the end, but hope you enjoy it all the same!
Puzzle trouble?
You need to input a three-digit combination in the final room. Search for three numbers marked with an "sq" symbol around the map, from north to south (one of which is in a screenshot on this page).Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
very cool! I loved the exploration gameplay with the compass interface!
Thanks! The compass interface was fun to implement. I usually have a lot of trouble with the bitsy exit/ending functions, so it made it a lot easier to have everything pointing to the same 5 coordinates!
This is so cool! There used to be places like this around where I lived when I was younger, so it was very nostalgic playing this. In love with the different scenaries, the signages, and the graffitis. Had a lot of fun reading them all~
Aw thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
I really liked this, reminds me of some old Mac adventure games
Thank you so much!!! I’d be really interested to hear about the Mac games it reminded you of, too. It’s an area I never delved into, but I do love the aesthetic of old hypercard / Apple 2 games.
Not any in particular, I just had a phase 10 years ago of downloading random Mac games which often had that kind of room-moving static background, and I'm just a sucker for 1-bit pixelarts especially of urban places :)
Very cool experience. It does feel like a good piece of urban exploration.
Thank you for playing! If I’d had more time, I would have liked to really expand the underground portion and emphasise the urbex element more. I’ll probably return to this in a future game anyway, since I love creepy abandoned urban areas!