DVN8

About the game

DVN8 is a small exploration game set inside a house. You approach it from the garden, with a clear goal: dive deep into the sprawling walls and finish what you came to do. The house is a map of about twenty connected rooms, each drawn as a first-person picture: a hallway fading into the distance, a nook with large windows, a library. You move between them one step at a time, and the picture changes as you go.

The house does not play fair. One hallway somehow loops back on itself, so that you see yourself repeated at the end of it. There are walls you can walk through and others that only look like doorways. Somewhere along the way you have to collect three keys, because a large ornate door with three keyholes is waiting for them. The puzzles are about paying attention and remembering where you have been, and the game works best if you take your time.

Every room shows a number labelled READ. In the original release, those numbers point to short passages in an illustrated manual that describes the room in words, like a small gamebook. The pictures work on their own, but the number is a handy way to tell the rooms apart.

Playing it here

DVN8 is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. This one targets SCHIP, the extended CHIP-8 with a bigger screen, and is a first-person, picture-by-picture adventure. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.

Click Play. Every room shows a picture on the left side of the screen and a number labelled READ at the bottom left; that number is the passage of the game's printed manual that describes the room. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Think of a compass. The four movement keys always go north, west, south and east on the map, not left and right relative to what you see.

Look for the repeats. Some rooms look identical on purpose. The READ number in the corner tells you whether you have really moved.

Hunt for three keys. The big door with three keyholes is the goal of the exploration, so keep track of where you have already looked.

Credits and licence

DVN8 was made by SystemLogoff, who builds CHIP-8 games with Octo and says that the dungeon crawlers and cheesy text adventures of the past were the inspiration. Its manual thanks the Octo author and the Awful Jams community. It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The game is kept in the Chip8 Community Archive, which places everything in it in the public domain under CC0 1.0. The licence text is linked from this page.