A Genuinely Unique Experience - and Free!

 

  As someone just about old enough to have real memories of the days when connecting to the internet with your trusty modem involved bombarding your ears with a minute or so of garbled satanic-robot-gibberish, you'd think the appeal of Digital: A Love Story , designed to emulate the super old school Amiga Workbench systems and the BBS messaging boards that were so prevalent among geeks using them, would be lost on me. This was not the case.
 
 

                                                     
I tried Digital on a moment's whim, expecting a brief ten minutes or so of mild entertainment - it is FREE after all. What I got was something completely unique and often fascinating that had me absorbed for a couple of hours. And while most of the time it could hardly be considered a "game" at all, I can safely say that at the end of it all, it was most definitely an experience.
 
 
To describe Digital in any great detail would be to spoil a lot of its charm, so I'll keep details to a minimum. 
You "play" yourself, having just discovered the wonderful world of BBS - or Bulletin Board Systems - ie. the internet forums of the 80's.  
Gameplay consists of working within the virtual operating system the game provides in order to visit various BBS', sending and receiving messages, doing some light "hacking" here and there and carrying out a little basic detective work.
 
These hardly sound like the most thrilling activities, and by themselves they're not. But where Digital 
really shines is in how it feels

real. It does a wonderful job of drawing you in to that geek-ish fantasy of trawling message boards hunting down clues and conspiracies, cracking passwords, and exchanging "warez"  with believable forum personae - it even includes douchebags posting illegible rants on why Picard was a shitty captain (no, seriously).  The game definitely has a sense of humour that really plays on the era in which it's set, if you look for it . One prevalent board user posts under the name "#42" for example. 
 
The plot begins with you striking up a close friendship with a girl via BBS, but grows in to something much grander and genuinely fascinating. Make no mistake: brief as the experience might be, at its core this is a romance, and I'll be damned if the events leading up to the end didn't tug at my heart strings and maybe even itch my tear ducts a little. It's really impressive that an entirely text-based experience presented in this way, and lasting between one and two hours, can draw such an emotional response.
 
On a final note, it would be a crime not to mention the game's excellent soundtrack, all of which nails the various moods and atmospheres throughout the story perfectly. It consists entirely of licence-free chiptune/8-bit beats from various known artists in the genre, and I highly suggest checking them out if that's your thing - the game is even nice enough to provide links in the credits.