I Play Games: If On A Winter's Night Four Travellers

If On A Winter’s Night Four Travellers

Being a half-educated buffoon I’ve never read Italo Calvino, so can’t tell you how this point-and-click adventure game comments on his novels. In a framing story there is a masked ball on a train somewhere in Central Asia in 1928. Three travellers aren’t quite sure how they got there, so tell the story of what happened just before hand.

A man in an apartment Rome is going to split up with his lover and it goes badly. A woman in a country manor in England can’t understand why everything is in shadow until she takes her medicine and it clears up. In New York a doctor is going to perform a ritual during which he must confront his actions in the war, and more.

Each of these has gruesome elements, and to progress you have to carry some of them out yourself. These include killing people in bloody and messy ways (a cat dies but not on screen). The game labels clickable spots when you mouse over them, making it easy to navigate, and the puzzles are not especially hard for someone with experience at this sort of game. They mostly make sense, though when you get deep into the weirdness of the later two stories they come closer to dream logic.

Play This: For a creepy point and click adventure
Don’t Play This: Playing through horror is not for you
Available For Free: On The Steam and also on itch.io