The rise of Fake OS games has been a joy to see. From platformers to true simulations of old or fiction-based operating systems, it’s been fascinating to see what ideas are being brought to this up-and-coming genre. It’s so up-and-coming that InterfaceX, a Steam festival that took place only this year, revealed over 30 new fake OS games in the accompanying showcase, with the added goal of persuading Valve to add a ‘Fake OS’ tag on Steam.
Desktop Explorer was part of that event, and it’s there that I first laid eyes on the game. Harkening back to simpler times with its Windows 98-inspired aesthetics, including its own riff on the infamous Microsoft Office paperclip mascot helper, named Ziparro here, Desktop Explorer played with my nostalgia in many positive ways. You will be able to delve into the workings of programs and files, enabling you to change the way they work, which had the double positive of not only giving you some freedom to explore the system but also the peace of mind that you won’t be breaking the PC (something I’ve done many times in the past!)
The narrative around the game follows a person known as Guppy. You’re trying to piece together certain information surrounding Halibut, your dementia-suffering uncle, and a missing teenager called Max by rooting around a PC that’s seemingly connected to both people. As you do, you stumble on a mysterious program called ‘Desktop Explorer’, and after firing it up, realise it’s an adventure-style text game with a mysterious undertone which grabs Guppy’s attention, especially when connections are made with the real world.
‘Desktop Explorer’ plays out as windows in the PC’s file explorer. Each contains a mixture of text files, pictures and a locked folder which contains the next ‘level’ of the game. It’s up to you to use the provided files to figure out the password that will unlock the file so you can progress to the next ‘level’. The game manages to successfully subvert your expectations not only through the way it presents its puzzles but also through the way the narrative and its gameplay evolve throughout the game.
The puzzles themselves are truly cryptic and obtuse; they will demand that you think outside the box on many occasions. I do commend this direction, as it allowed the developers to play around and invent some truly clever and innovative puzzles that play with your knowledge of an operating system. You’ll be renaming and compressing files, manipulating and installing programs, and using utilities like the calculator or the time/date settings to solve the puzzles in front of you. Many times I was amazed at the innovation on show.
But because of the nature of these puzzles, the average player will most likely get consistently stuck, perhaps to the point of conceding and moving on to a more forgiving game. I say this with firsthand knowledge, having just come from spending a whole day attempting one particular puzzle only to eventually walk away defeated. The game is simply missing a layer of accessibility to make sure all skill levels are catered to, which is a misstep in my books, especially when you consider the type of puzzles included.
The developers have given some thought to a hint system, as you can select the source code option from the window menu, which usually contains a hint or two relevant to the puzzle you’re attempting, or sometimes important words will appear in bold in a body of text. But even these can be pretty cryptic, only feeding your confusion towards what the game is asking of you. I would love to have seen a more friendly approach like a story mode or a more sophisticated hint system to alleviate the negative emotions some will receive while attempting to play this.
Which is a shame as the mysterious narrative involving Guppy, Halibut and Max was a true highlight. Most of the storyline is told through journal entries that are found amongst other files in the same ‘Desktop Explorer’ windows. These pages come from the main cast, with them either remembering important milestones in their lives or what is occurring at the time. Not only do these give important context towards the characters and the overarching story but also serve to provide more hints towards the game’s puzzles.
Yet again, these hints are hidden well, and it will take some deducing to figure out what you’ll need to take from them, but it’s there if you look hard enough. You can also root through the computer’s files to find more information on the characters, including the documents and picture folders, though it did break the immersion slightly with the graphically rendered photos I found instead of real ones.
These were the most jarring aspects of the game visually, as the rest of the game looked absolutely wonderful. Everything looked as it should: the desktop brimming with era-appropriate icons, the start menu and taskbar behaving as they should and the windows themselves looking and feeling as clunky as you remember them. Pizarro is the star, though, with its comical expressions and cheeky speech, which brought a welcome distraction when I was stuck hitting tool tips. Sometimes it was nice to “talk to” simply to get a break from bending my brain trying to solve a puzzle.
A question I left with when the game was finished is, ‘Would someone who didn’t grow up in the era it’s based in and wouldn’t receive the nostalgia hit it’s aiming for still enjoy this game?’ I came away with the view that they would. One of the great things about fake OS games is that they’re still a universally understandable affair. The dated look just appeals more, not just as a nostalgia point but also a historical one for younger people to see what the boom of instant messaging, web surfing and PCs in general looked and felt like at the time, and with Desktop Explorer’s other strong mechanics, it’s one that can be enjoyed by mostly any age.
And although I’m conflicted on the puzzle difficulty, I was pleased to have experienced it. The way all the separate parts of the game come together to tell a really interesting story was fascinating to experience and very cleverly thought out. There’s more to this game than you may believe, which also made me want to see what else it had up its sleeves even if that meant wrecking my brain against its puzzles, and I came away with care for the characters with its well-written scripts.
