Night of the Neon Lounge.
Pete Pomade is thirty-eight. He sells industrial flooring. He lives with his mother. He owns one baby-blue polyester suit and one gold medallion, and tonight, after one hundred and four consecutive failures in the same bar, he is going to change his entire life before 3:00 AM.
How it plays
parser adventureType what Pete should do
"Talk to Moe." "Buy wine." "Give the sardine to the cat." A real parser, not a menu. Clicking a prop examines it and then tells you what Pete can actually do with it, because a parser game where you see a thing and can't guess the verb is one people quit in the first minute.
Score out of 100
Points for progress, and a full score breakdown whenever you ask. There is a good ending. Getting to it takes knowing the night.
Die a great deal
Sequin City has Pete's number. Every death is written, numbered, and collectable. Getting handsy with anybody gets him thrown out of the bar, which is the joke working as intended.
Everything is original
Every character, location, line of dialogue, pixel and sound was made for this game. The art is drawn in code, so it stays sharp at any size and the whole thing is under 300 KB.
Nothing to install
It runs in the browser with no account, no network calls once loaded, and no analytics. Your save lives on your own device.
Also an iPhone app
The identical game wrapped for iOS, 492 KB, on TestFlight now. Email if you want on the list.
18+. Crude language, heavy innuendo, and adult situations. Nothing explicit is described and nobody is naked, but this is a bar comedy about a man trying to get laid and it is not coy about it. The joke is always on Pete: every woman in the game is smarter, faster and more self-possessed than he is, and the cat outclasses him.
Why it exists
Parser adventures died for bad reasons. The genre's reputation rests on games that hid their verbs, killed you without warning, and punished you for curiosity. The form itself was never the problem. This one keeps what was good, a world you poke at in sentences, and throws out what wasn't: it tells you the verbs, it says why you died, and it lets you undo the night.
Play it in your browser, or email for the iPhone build.