Have You Played... 9:05?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

The phone rings.

Oh, no — how long have you been asleep? Sure, it was a tough night, but… This is bad. This is very bad.

The phone rings.

9:05 [official site] is a text adventure about being late for work. When you finish playing it, you'll almost definitely tell the next person you meet to play it immediately, even if that person is a stranger at a bus stop.

If you have played 9:05, you can join my club. It's a club where we meet up and smile about 9:05 and then tell everyone that they just have to go and play it because we don't want to spoil it for them. And if they say "but you've already spoiled it by implying that there's something more interesting going on than a man being late for work", we kick them out, lock the door and then fret about accidentally spoiling a very clever thing.

But we haven't spoiled it. Not really. It is a game about being late for work and the punchlines are in the preposterous detail of the world, and the finicky nature of the inputs needed to get through the morning. It's the kind of joke you can't really spoil, if it is a joke at all.

Seriously - if you're still here and not a member of the club, go and play the damn game. It's free and it's a great entry point into the rest of author Adam Cadre's interactive fiction, as well as the wider world of textual pleasures.