It Is Pitch Black for Mac

Inspired by Will Crowther’s inaugural text-based adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, Nintendo’s graphical action-adventure, The Legend of Zelda, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s transmedial novel, House of Leaves (2000), It Is Pitch Black is an original “text-based action-adventure” game combining the text parsers of interactive fiction with the polygonal collision of 3D navigable space. It Is Pitch Black features a nonvisual environment illuminated not by lamp, but by the quickly scrolling debugger log of recombinant poetry. The speed and scale of output is directly proportional to the speed of the computer running the game and, as such, indexes each of the game’s discrete states while representing the stream of consciousness of two women: Patricia Wilcox, an avid caver married to Will Crowther in the 1970s, and Karen Green, Will Navidson’s long suffering partner in House of Leaves. In It Is Pitch Black, both Patricia and Karen’s journey through the dark is narrated through the footnotes of “Will,” the conflated author-figure.

To play the game, first download and extract the files from the .DMG for (for Mac) or .ZIP (for PC). Then double click the .APP or .EXE to launch the It Is Pitch Black preference panel. Select your preferred resolution, quality, and input options then press "Play!"

Default Controls: Press Space to Begin Press Esc to Exit WASD to Move