Enjoy biomechanical biker body horror in free interactive fiction Greaser
A great little goopy treat
What are you doing for the next ten minutes? Nothing much? Alright, here's what you're doing: playing Greaser, a wee free visual novel about riding a Cronenbergian biomechanical motorbike along an endless unreal desert highway. It's playable in your browser so kick-start on over to Itch.io right now. I don't know what else you're doing this morning that'll get your engine running more than adventure, self-discovery, and erotic motorbike maintenance.
I'll not describe much because Greaser is short, but I enjoyed it very much. A personal story about a short moment in a world which feels so very much bigger. It does well to rouse my interest, then is sensible enough to not ruin the magic by over-explaining history and mystery. This place is, these things are, and here's our story within it. Some low-res black & white art, a few sounds, and we're in there. Also, the biomechanical body horror is in the perfect spot between gross and erotic.
Greaser was made by nat_content as part of a recent game jam organised by Domino Club on the theme 'metal & flesh'. (Folks who enjoy looking into game tech might want to check out Super Videotome, the web-based visual novel platform it's built on, which I hadn't heard of before.) That game jam produced 31 games so ooh I'll have to check out more of these.
Do also check out Domino Club's great Twitter thread with bespoke awards with artwork for each jam game. They've certainly made me more curious about some of them.
Fans of body horror upon endless cursed highways might fancy checking out Archive 81, a horror serial fiction podcast (which Netflix loosely adapted into a show, which they, of course, immediately cancelled). A mini-series following Season 3 explored an extradimensional highway with a pal who lost his body to a supernatural payphone system which offers favours in exchange for flesh. Season 3 mostly focuses on different characters in the same world as the rest so I guess you could skip to that then roll into Left Of The Dial but all of Archive 81 is good in different ways. I like how dramatically it shifts between seasons. Lots of fun body horror in other places, too.