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Atrocitron
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About the game
You start at the grand exit of a strange building. A sign above the archway is counting customers, the rest of the place lies to the north, and the game politely insists that everybody read its instructions first. When you do, it lays out the deal: the solution is different every time you play, you can make the game unwinnable without being told, and saving and undoing are switched off.
That is the joke and the challenge. Atrocitron belongs to the Annoyotron family of comic games that set out to break every rule of fair play, and this fifth instalment turns the idea into a puzzle box. The rooms and the objects in them are less a story than a machine, and your job is to work out how that machine behaves, what moves your "environmental impact" score and what is hiding behind it all.
Michael C. Martin released it in December 2016 and, in his own words, ended up making "a puzzle hunt artifact instead of a deliberately awful work of IF". It rewards curiosity, note-taking and a sense of humour more than patience with the parser.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Type a command after the >
prompt and press Enter. The game is in English. Type about before anything
else: it is short and it explains the rules of this particular game.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north, south, east, west (or n, s, e, w) |
walk around the building |
look (l) |
describe where you are again |
examine (x), take, drop, push, turn something |
prod at the objects you find |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
score |
your environmental impact, out of 15 |
about, rationale, credits |
the rules, the author's reasons and the thanks |
A few things worth knowing
Read ABOUT first. The game says so three times in its banner, and it is right.
Keep notes. Without save or undo, a written record of what you tried and what changed is the closest thing to a safety net.
Restarting is part of the game. Since every game is different and some are lost early, starting over is expected, not a failure.
Look at the patterns. The author wants the puzzle to be solvable by playing, so repeated experiments are the intended route.
Credits and licence
Atrocitron was written by Michael C. Martin and tested by Dan Uznanski, Dave Bushong, Audrey Carstensen and Geordan Rosario. The version served here is Release 1 (serial 161215). In 2023 the author published the source code on the IF Archive under the simplified (two-clause) BSD licence, whose text is linked from this page.